# data[].attributes.headline
Key found in Avery's house on the 8th day of searching by Manitowoc Police Department after several others searched

# data[].attributes.subject
Key found in Avery's house on the 8th day of searching by Manitowoc Police Department after several others searched

# data[].attributes.headline
portion of Steven's threatening letter to his wife while serving 18 years in prison

# data[].attributes.subject
portion of Steven's threatening letter to his wife while serving 18 years in prison

# data[].attributes.headline
Blood evidence that was never discussed HOW it got there when Avery was suppose to have been wearing gloves

# data[].attributes.subject
Blood evidence that was never discussed HOW it got there when Avery was suppose to have been wearing gloves

# data[].attributes.headline
14 pieces of evidence glossed over or left out of the documentary

# data[].attributes.subject
14 pieces of evidence glossed over or left out of the documentary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
"Making a Murderer" tells only part of the Steven Avery story. (PHOTO: Netflix/Making a Murderer)

Gallery: Real locations from "Making a Murderer"

There are key pieces of evidence that Netflix's riveting docuseries "Making a Murderer" didn't tell you about or skipped over. Of course, those things make Steven Avery look worse.

It's been fascinating watching the national interest in the Steven Avery case blow up. The wildly heated social media commentary seems to be breaking down into warring narratives. I've lost count how many people have insisted Avery (and his nephew Brendan Dassey) are guilty because they watched news media coverage about the cases years ago (lots of us were guilty of that). I've also lost count of how many people now insist outright that they're innocent because they watched a Netflix documentary. Perhaps one of the shining lessons here is to scrutinize everything.

I fall somewhere in between now. Before I watched the 10-part docuseries, I thought they were guilty (admittedly also from scattered news accounts and then DA Ken Kratz's emotional and graphic press conference in which he outlined the Dassey "confession" details he never ended up using against Avery). At the time, the planting argument seemed ridiculous. The docuseries - built on a mountain of video and audio - altered my perceptions because it revealed new information I wasn't aware of before.

I don't know if Avery did or didn't do it. I still think he might have. There's serious evidence pointing in his direction. However, I also think the documentary raises many troubling questions that remain unanswered, including about the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department's continuing involvement in the case.

I also think the new video and audio of the cognitively slow teenager Dassey was shocking, and he probably deserves a new trial. That doesn't mean he didn't do it. It means everyone deserves fair representation, and his earlier team seemed far from it. Furthermore, his confession was contradicted in ways by forensic evidence (why wasn't Halbach's blood found in Avery's trailer or garage?), and there was no forensic evidence in the form of his DNA, blood or fingerprints tying Dassey himself to the crime.

All of that being said, I was curious what evidence the documentary - which was clearly told from a defense advocacy perspective - left out or glossed over. Everyone should be interested in the same thing here: the pursuit of truth and justice for Teresa Halbach. Perhaps if we piece together more of the puzzle, as was done in court and in the documentary in different ways, we will find that the picture gets clearer. I wish a news station would rerun the trial from gavel-to-gavel, frankly. That would be even better yet.

Then-DA Ken Kratz has been fighting back hard in People Magazine this week claiming the documentary omitted key evidence. I didn't want to take his word for any of it, though (especially due to his later problems). Instead, I went back to news accounts and some court transcripts from the time. Those are not infallible, either, of course. But they are interesting. It's too bad the Netflix documentarians left things out or quickly passed over things. They would have created an even richer tapestry if they hadn't.

Earlier, I told you about the four alternative suspects the defense tried unsuccessfully to raise during the trial. Turns out there were a bunch of unsavory characters on the property that day or who had access to it.

Here are 14 other things that you also may not have heard yet:

1. Leg irons and handcuffs were found in Avery's residence and in Dassey's

The criminal complaint contended that authorities "located items of restraints within Steven Avery's residence including hand cuffs and leg irons."

According to a lengthy Milwaukee Magazine story from May 1, 2006, Avery admitted they were his, stating of the handcuffs and leg irons, "I bought them. I wanted to try out something different with Jodi (his girlfriend)."

Of course, it's also very curious that Halbach's DNA didn't turn up on these handcuffs and leg irons if they were used to restrain her.

Interestingly, according to the testimony of the Department of Justice investigator in Dassey's trial, that's not the only place such things were found. He testified that leg irons and handcuffs were found in both Avery's and also Dassey's mother's residence, although on cross examination he stated that Brendan Dassey's prints and DNA weren't on them. In otherwords, it was not proven at all that these belonged to Dassey. But they were there, according to court transcripts.

2. Avery and his girlfriend had a less than rosy relationship at times

The Netflix documentary paints the romance of Jodi and Steven as a positive one. It may have been in some ways, but there were also some problems.

According to the Milwaukee magazine story, "In September 2004, sheriff deputies arrested Avery for violating a disorderly conduct ordinance after an altercation with (Jodi) Stachowski. The court ordered him to stay away from the woman for 72 hours and pay a fine of $243."

3. The car key unearthed in Avery's residence had DNA from his sweat on it, the prosecutor says

The documentary makes tangential reference about perspiration but not in a way that it's focused on or made particularly memorable. Rather, the documentary seemed to focus more on just saying his DNA was on the Halbach car key and focusing on a theory that law enforcement planted Avery's blood in Halbach's car (which they deny).

From the Milwaukee magazine article, "A state analyst determined blood from the car and dried perspiration on the car key matched Steven Avery's DNA." Kratz also detailed this contention in his opening statement in the Dassey trial, according to the transcript, saying the crime lab analyst recovered a full DNA profile of Avery from the sweat on this key. (update: the defense claims it was not proven that this was sweat or what is called "touch DNA").

The key, of course, is the key piece of evidence the defense claims law enforcement planted. There are very fishy things about the key. It was found by a Manitowoc law enforcement official days after others had already searched Avery's residence repeatedly and had not found it - and Manitowoc had already publicly handed over the case because of Avery's pending wrongful conviction lawsuit against that agency. This same officer was deposed shortly before the murder in Avery's civil suit for his previous wrongful conviction. Very weird.

However, it's harder to envision officers getting their hands on Avery's sweat or skin cells for what is called touch DNA. When it came to evidence planting allegations, the documentary talked more about a vial of his blood maintained from the previous wrongful conviction case (also curious because it had a hole poked in the top of it, of course). The DNA evidence was more complex.

4. Dassey's mother said Dassey helped Avery clean his garage floor

The Milwaukee Magazine article further stated that, "On February 27, Dassey's mother spoke with police investigators. Barbara Janda, 41, mentioned that her son had stained his pants while helping his uncle clean his garage floor around Halloween." Also, according to the Department of Justice investigator's testimony in Dassey's trial, Dassey's pants had bleach stains that he said were from helping clean the garage, transcripts say.

5. Pornography was recovered in Avery's residence

The Wisconsin State Journal reported on Nov. 12, 2005 that officers recovered "pornographic material, according to the search warrants."

6. The previous animal cruelty case involved a bonfire

This animal abuse incident was mentioned in the documentary but not in great detail. According to an Associated Press story from Nov. 20, 2005, "Steven was convicted in 1981 of burglary. He got five years probation, which was revoked in 1982 after he was charged with animal cruelty for pouring gasoline on a cat and throwing it into a bonfire."

7. Avery had drawn a torture chamber while in prison and was violent to other women

According to an Appleton Post Crescent article from March 9, 2006, "While he was in prison, Steven Avery planned the torture and killing of a young woman, new documents released Wednesday indicate. The allegations are included in 22 pages of court documents accompanying additional charges filed by Calumet County Dist. Atty. Ken Kratz. ... Kratz also included in Wednesday's filings statements from prisoners who served time with Avery at Green Bay Correctional Institution. They said Avery talked about and showed them diagrams of a torture chamber he planned to build when he was released."

Furthermore, reported the newspaper, " The filings also include statements from a woman, now 41, who said she was raped by Avery, who told her 'if she yelled or screamed there was going to be trouble.' There also is an affidavit from a girl who said she was raped by Avery. 'The victim's mother indicated that the victim does not want to speak about the sexual assault between her and Steven Avery because Steven Avery told her if she 'told anyone about their activities together he would kill her family,'" the filing said. According to the newspaper article, "The affidavit said Avery admitted to his fiancee that he had sexually assaulted the girl."

8. Avery once opened his door "just wearing a towel" when Halbach went to his property previously

There's evidence for this one, but it was never allowed in trial. This was one of Kratz' claims to People Magazine. According to People Magazine, "He cites Halbach's Oct. 10, 2005 visit to the property owned by Avery's family for a photo shoot for AutoTrader magazine: According to Kratz, Avery allegedly opened his door 'just wearing a towel. She was creeped out [by him]. ... She [went to her employer and] said she would not go back because she was scared of him.'"

According to an Associated Press story from Feb. 14, 2007, the judge "would not allow Dawn Pliszka, an Auto Trader receptionist at the time, to testify about one of Halbach's previous encounters with Avery," said the story, continuing:

"She had stated to me that he had come out in a towel," Pliszka said while the jury was outside of the courtroom. "I just said, 'Really?' and then she said, 'Yeah,' and laughed and said kinda 'Ew.'"

The AP article said the judge would not allow the testimony to be heard by the jury "because the date wasn't clear and few details were known about the alleged encounter."

9. Avery called Auto Trader to specifically request Halbach the day she died

This is also contained in the same AP story. It said that the same woman, Pliszka, testified - this time before the jury - that Avery called her on Oct. 31, 2005 "to request the photographer who had been out to the property previously."

Angela Schuster, magazine operations supervisor, further testified that Halbach went to the Avery compound six times from June to Halloween to take pictures and also said, "She talked to Halbach by phone around 11 a.m. that day to tell her of the appointment at the Avery property," according to the AP.

10. Avery called Halbach's cell phone three times, twice using the Star-67 feature to hide his identity

According to a newspaper article in the River Falls Journal from Feb. 28, 2007, Luring Cellular company workers Bobbi Dohrwardt and Laura Schadrie testified that "Avery's cell phone made three calls to Halbach's cell, and he twice used the Star-67 feature that hid his identity." These calls came in about 2:30 p.m.

According to an Associated Press article from Feb. 28, 2007, "The third call was placed about two hours later." It "lasted 13 seconds," and the phone company worker "couldn't tell if it was answered or went into voice mail."

11. Avery gave a false name when he called Auto Trader

From the same AP story, "Prosecutors are trying to convince a jury that Avery lured Halbach to the family salvage yard by booking an appointment with the magazine, using the name of his sister Barb Janda, to take a picture of a red minivan that Janda wanted to sell."

Of course, this could be explained by the fact that it was his sister's car that Halbach was to photograph.

12. The burnt bone fragments were mixed with steel tire belts

According to the criminal complaint, "Officers also located remnants of steel belts of tires that appear to have been utilized as fire accelerants."

A Nov. 15, 2005 Wisconsin State Journal article reported that, " Investigators also said in the court documents that they found steel belts of about six tires that were used as fire accelerants. They also found a number of 5-gallon buckets that appeared to have been used to distribute burned remains." Kratz told People Magazine the bone fragments "were 'intertwined' with the steel belts."

13. Avery's blood was found in six places in the Halbach vehicle, and DNA from his sweat was found on a hood latch, the prosecutor says

I found this in Kratz' opening statement in the Dassey trial transcript. He told the jury that the Avery blood was found on the ignition of the vehicle, on a CD case and on seats. He also said that Avery had a cut on his finger. And he stated that the state crime lab analyst had found DNA from Avery's sweat on the hood latch of the Halbach vehicle. He also stated that Dassey had said in his confession that Avery opened the car's hood.

14. Avery's rifle matched the bullet with the Halbach DNA on it

This is also in the opening statement. It says that Dassey said the bullet in the garage came from a specific gun of Avery's that hung on Avery's wall and that forensic testing matched the bullet with the Halbach DNA to this specific gun. This bullet was found months later by a Manitowoc law enforcement officer after others missed it during repeated searches.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
14 pieces of troubling evidence "Making a Murderer" left out or glossed over

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Earlier, I told you about the four alternative suspects the defense tried unsuccessfully to raise during the trial. But here are 14 other things that you also may not have heard yet: key pieces of evidence against Steven Avery that "Making a Murderer" skipped over.

# data[].attributes.headline
Juror reveals Avery verdict was compromised

# data[].attributes.subject
Juror reveals Avery verdict was compromised

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
MANITOWOC -- A member of the jury that declared Steven Avery guilty in the death of Teresa Halbach actually believes Avery was not guilty -- but was afraid to say so at the time, the makers of the Netflix documentary series "Making a Murderer" said Tuesday, January 5th. The unnamed juror reached out to the filmmakers shortly before the series debuted in December and followed up again after watching the 10 episodes. So will this change anything for Steven Avery?

In 2007, Avery was found guilty of murdering Halbach, but not guilty of a charge of mutilating a corpse. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

"Making a Murderer" recounts the trial and raises numerous questions about possible police and prosecutorial misconduct. Since its premiere on Netflix two weeks ago, it has captivated viewers and caused hundreds of thousands of people to sign petitions supporting Avery and calling for his release.

Meanwhile, the lead prosecutor in the case, Ken Kratz (and others) have denounced the documentary as biased in favor of the defense.

Avery's defense attorneys argued that Avery could have been framed for Halbach's murder. At the time of Halbach's death, Avery was suing local authorities for compensation due to his wrongful conviction in a 1985 rape case. The conviction was overturned in 2003, and Avery was released from prison after 18 years.

The filmmakers said on Tuesday the unnamed juror that came forward believes Avery was framed.

"They said they thought that the world needed to know what happened," Moira Demos, one of the filmmakers, told CNN.

Demos's producing partner Laura Ricciardi said this juror believes a retrial is warranted -- somewhere far from Wisconsin, where the original trial took place. Ricciardi said the juror "told us the verdicts in Steven's trial were a compromise. That was the actual word the juror used, and went on to describe the jurors ultimately trading votes in the jury room. Explicitly discussing, 'If you vote guilty on this count, I will vote not guilty on this count.' That was a significant revelation."

According to the juror, the finding of not guilty on the count of mutilating a corpse -- a "split verdict" -- was intended to "send a message to the appellate courts," Demos said.

"They thought that Steven would get a new trial. That was sort of their plan and it didn't work out that way," Demos said.

Wisconsin's Supreme Court rejected Avery's later bid.

Demos and Ricciardi first disclosed their contact with the juror on NBC's "Today" show on Tuesday.

As some jurors begin to come forward, Janine Geske, a former Wisconsin Supreme Court justice says it's highly unlikely Avery will ever get a new trial.

The Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office has become the target of threats following the release of the documentary on December 18th.

"We've probably reached 200-300 emails in our agency," said Robert Hermann, Manitowoc County sheriff.

Many of those emails have not been kind.

"Rot in hell. I hope when you meet your maker, you go to hell," Hermann said.

The Netflix documentary highlights the case against Avery and also -- his nephew, Brendan Dassey, who was also convicted in the murder of Teresa Halbach -- a young photographer for Auto Trader magazine.

Avery is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Dassey was sentenced to life in prison with a chance for parole in 2048.

Prosecutors say the documentary only tells one side of this story.

"If something new comes up then MAYBE someone can file something new for a new trial," Geske said.

Geske served as a justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She says she's never seen a reaction like she's seeing to this Netflix documentary.

"It's unique and I have never seen it happen in another case," Geske said.

Geske had this to say after the filmmakers announced they were contacted by a juror who indicated the verdicts were a compromise:

"It is one thing to say that. It is another -- what will have to happen, if there is any truth to that, is they are going to have affidavits back in front of the trial judge. Jurors are going to have to testify and it is VERY difficult to set aside a jury verdict," Geske said.

Geske says she doubts the new information will have any impact in this case.

She says barring any new evidence, Avery's options have been depleted.

"I have not heard of anything that is going to lead to Steven Avery being released under any circumstance," Geske said.

As for Brendan Dassey, Geske says there is more legal hope for him.

There is currently a federal habeas petition alleging that Dassey's constitutional rights were violated and it requests that his conviction be vacated.

But Geske says if Dassey is granted a new trial, it won't happen any time soon.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Juror reveals Steven Avery verdicts were a compromise: Does that give him any hope for new trial?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
MANITOWOC -- A member of the jury that declared Steven Avery guilty in the death of Teresa Halbach actually believes Avery was not guilty -- but was afraid to say so at the time, the makers of the Netflix documentary series "Making a Murderer" said Tuesday, January 5th.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Making a Murderer: Season 1 - Rotten Tomatoes

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Synopsis: Season 1 examines the legal woes of Steven Avery, a man who spent 18 years in prison despite being wrongfully convicted of sexual assault. Several years after he was released, he was accused of murder, found guilty and sent back to prison.}

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi's 10-part documentary focuses on the case of Steven Avery, a man convicted of sexual assault, before being exonerated by DNA evidence 18 years later. A few years later, he is convicted in the disappearance and murder of another woman.

# data[].attributes.headline
Petition created at Change.org to free Steven Avery

# data[].attributes.subject
Petition created at Change.org to free Steven Avery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
President of the United States: Free Steven Avery

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There is a documentary series on Netflix called "Making a Murderer". After viewing it, I am outraged with the injustices which have been allowed to compound and left unchecked in the case of Steven Avery of Manitowoc County in Wisconsin, U.S.A. Avery's unconstitutional mistreatment at the hands of corrupt...

# data[].attributes.headline
Prosecutor calls series a defendant piece 

# data[].attributes.subject
Prosecutor calls series a defendant piece 

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Making a Murderer' Prosecutor Ken Kratz | EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW on the Evidence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ken Kratz tells ABC News that the popular Netflix series on the Steven Avery case leaves out important evidence.

# data[].attributes.headline
Phone Conversation where Dassey tells him mother Steven molested him, omitted from Documentary

# data[].attributes.subject
Phone Conversation where Dassey tells him mother Steven molested him, omitted from Documentary

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Less than a mile after turning off a state highway on which I was driving 60 mph, a police officer who was sitting in his cruiser on the other side of trees at the 35 mph speed limit sign pulled me over. I was slowing down, but apparently not quickly enough. I didn't deserve the ticket because I was not a danger and was in the process of complying with the law.

Laws are designed to keep chaos at bay, to set a foundation for a civil society. My not slowing down fast enough was not a threat to the social order.

I initially complained to my wife that I had been victimized by an unfair speed trap in a small town I rarely visit. But then I had to admit that though it was my first speeding ticket in 20 years, it wasn't my first time speeding during the past two decades. I've been punished a lot less than I otherwise could have. I've committed moving violations just about every time I drive -- like most drivers -- even when I don't notice.

About the time of my last ticket, the country was fighting over O.J. Simpson. Most white Americans were horrified that because they believed he got away with a double murder and didn't want to know about prosecutorial mistakes and dubious police actions. Most black people cheered that a system they had long believed was corrupt had been beaten, for once. A lead detective lying on the stand, using the n-word and bragging about planting evidence were not incidental facts to them.

Confronting the reality

"Making a Murderer" is forcing us to confront those disparate views anew, as well as encouraging us to better understand that the people who are ticketed or jailed and imprisoned more, and more harshly, than the rest of us aren't necessarily more deserving of punishment than those of us who have skated by dent of birth, happenstance or policy design.

Michelle Alexander did a great job detailing that arbitrariness in "The New Jim Crow."

Here's one of many examples:

"The clear majority of Americans of all races have violated drug laws. But due to resource constraints (and the politics of the drug war), only a small fraction are arrested, convicted, and incarcerated," she wrote. "In 2002, for example, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, compared to 1.5 million drug arrests and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense."

It's more than that, though, because more of us are beginning to realize that long-held, foundational principles of the American justice system -- everyone is innocent until proven guilty; you will only be convicted if there is no real doubt that you committed the crime -- are either outright lies or fantastical tales we tell ourselves.

"It's just simple. Once Steven Avery is accused of this killing -- and a lot of things seem to clearly point to him having done it -- as much as you mentally want to give him the benefit of doubt, it becomes impossible," Wisconsin State Assembly Rep. Mark Gundrum said in "Making a Murderer."

To fully appreciate the power of that statement, you have to know that Gundrum pushed for an important criminal justice reform bill in Avery's honor. Avery spent almost 18 years in prison for a rape he didn't commit. DNA testing done by the Innocence Project proved that a different man was the assailant. While he served time, the actual rapist was free to hurt other women. That man, Gregory Allen, is serving a 60-year prison sentence for a 1995 rape.

Gundrum led an effort to lessen the chances that another innocent man could be convicted, that is until Avery was charged with murder in the death of Teresa Halbach, a photographer whose body was found in the Avery family junkyard, while he was suing over his prior false imprisonment. Avery was convicted of the murder in 2007.

Gundrum knew about the flaws in the system, knew that not everything is what it seems, no matter how sure the cops and prosecutors sound. And still, even he couldn't hold fast to the presumption of innocence standard we pretend is a bedrock of our system.

Since the airing of the documentary, we've learned that a juror in the Avery case said the verdict was a sort of compromise, that not everyone in the room believed he had done what he had been charged with: the definition of reasonable doubt if ever there was one. No matter; they sent him to prison anyway.

History of 'reasonable doubt'

That shouldn't be surprising, given that the reasonable doubt standard today is responsible for things it wasn't designed for. While many people assume the standard grew out of a legal foundation, it began as something else entirely, James Q. Whitman of Yale Law School wrote in a paper called "Origins of Reasonable Doubt."

"The 'reasonable doubt' rule was not originally designed to serve the purpose it is asked to serve today: It was not originally designed to protect the accused. Instead, it was designed to protect the souls of the jurors against damnation," he wrote. "Convicting an innocent defendant was regarded, in the older Christian tradition, as a potential mortal sin. The purpose of the 'reasonable doubt' instruction was to address this frightening possibility, reassuring jurors that they could convict the defendant without risking their own salvation, as long as their doubts about guilt were not 'reasonable.'"

That would be little more than a curious historical footnote if it wasn't still resulting in so much harm today. Last year, I documented during a five-day series in The (Myrtle Beach) Sun News newspaper the plight of a man named Jamar Huggins. He's serving a 15-year prison sentence for his supposed role in a home invasion.

He was convicted even though nothing tied him to the crime or the victims, and the one person who fingered him was a woman convicted of a similar crime with a different man.

She was addicted to crack at the time and recanted on the stand. A juror I spoke to said they didn't believe a word of what she said, but they convicted him solely on her initial claim anyway.

An alternate juror told me there's no doubt he would have voted not guilty had he been the 12th, not 13th juror -- which would have been enough to set Huggins free. Talk about arbitrary. Because of that roll of the dice, Huggins sits in prison hoping an appeal is successful instead of raising his young kids and taking care of his elderly mother.

I complained about the arbitrariness of a cop giving me a ticket in a speed trap. That's nothing compared to what men like Avery and Huggins -- and too many others -- face. Finally, the public seems to be recognizing that ugly reality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
'making a murderer' and failing justice system (opinion) - cnn

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
'Making a Murderer' and failing justice system (Opinion) - CNN

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Less than a mile after turning off a state highway on which I was driving 60 mph, a police officer who was sitting in his cruiser on the other side of trees at the 35 mph speed limit sign pulled me over. I was slowing down, but apparently not quickly enough.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How "Making a Murderer" goes wrong.

Argosy began in 1882 as a magazine for children and ceased publication ninety-six years later as soft-core porn for men, but for ten years in between it was the home of a true-crime column by Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who gave the world Perry Mason. In eighty-two novels, six films, and nearly three hundred television episodes, Mason, a criminal-defense lawyer, took on seemingly guilty clients and proved their innocence. In the magazine, Gardner, who had practiced law before turning to writing, attempted to do something similar-except that there his "clients" were real people, already convicted and behind bars. All of them met the same criteria: they were impoverished, they insisted that they were blameless, they were serving life sentences for serious crimes, and they had exhausted their legal options. Gardner called his column "The Court of Last Resort."

To help investigate his cases, Gardner assembled a committee of crime experts, including a private detective, a handwriting analyst, a former prison warden, and a homicide specialist with degrees in both medicine and law. They examined dozens of cases between September of 1948 and October of 1958, ranging from an African-American sentenced to die for killing a Virginia police officer after a car chase-even though he didn't know how to drive-to a nine-fingered convict serving time for the strangling death of a victim whose neck bore ten finger marks.

The man who didn't know how to drive was exonerated, at least partly thanks to coverage in "The Court of Last Resort," as were many others. Meanwhile, the never terribly successful Argosy also got a reprieve. "No one in the publishing field had ever considered the remote possibility that the general reading public could ever be so interested in justice," Gardner wrote in 1951. " Argosy's circulation began to skyrocket." Six years later, the column was picked up by NBC and turned into a twenty-six-episode TV series.

Although it subsequently faded from memory, "The Court of Last Resort" stands as the progenitor of one of today's most popular true-crime subgenres, in which reporters, dissatisfied with the outcome of a criminal case, conduct their own extrajudicial investigations. Until recently, the standout representatives of this form were "The Thin Blue Line," a 1988 Errol Morris documentary about Randall Dale Adams, who was sentenced to death for the 1976 murder of a police officer; "Paradise Lost," a series of documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about three teen-agers found guilty of murdering three second-grade boys in West Memphis in 1993; and "The Staircase," a television miniseries by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade about the novelist Michael Peterson, found guilty of murdering his wife in 2001. Peterson has been granted a new trial. Randall Dale Adams was exonerated a year after "The Thin Blue Line" was released. Shortly before the final "Paradise Lost" documentary was completed, in 2011, all three of its subjects were freed from prison on the basis of DNA evidence.

In the past fifteen months, this canon has grown considerably in both content and prestige. First came "Serial," co-created by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, which revisited the case of Adnan Syed, convicted for the 1999 murder of his high-school classmate and former girlfriend, eighteen-year-old Hae Min Lee. That was followed by Andrew Jarecki's "The Jinx," a six-part HBO documentary that, uncharacteristically for the genre, sought to implicate rather than exonerate its subject, Robert Durst. A New York real-estate heir, Durst was acquitted in one murder case, is currently awaiting trial in another, and has long been suspected in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen Durst.

The latest addition to this canon is Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos's "Making a Murderer," a ten-episode Netflix documentary that examines the 2007 conviction of a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery. Like the prisoners featured in "The Court of Last Resort," Avery is a poor man serving time for a violent crime that he insists he didn't commit. The questions his story raises, however, are not just about his own guilt and innocence. Nearly seventy years have passed since Erle Stanley Gardner first tried a criminal case before the jury of the general public. Yet we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project-bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers-comes to serve as our court of last resort.

If you know anything about "Making a Murderer," you know that Steven Avery has a particularly troubling and convoluted relationship with the criminal-justice system. In July of 1985, Avery was picked up by the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department after a woman named Penny Beerntsen was brutally attacked while out for a run in a Wisconsin state park. Beerntsen, who had been conscious throughout most of the attack, deliberately sought to memorize her assailant's features, and subsequently picked Avery out of both a photo array and a live lineup. At trial six months later, Avery was found guilty and sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. He served eighteen of those before being exonerated by DNA testing, a technology not available at the time of the trial. That DNA test also identified Beerntsen's actual assailant: a man named Gregory Allen, who was, by then, imprisoned for another assault.

This was bad news for the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department. As the public learned soon after the exoneration, local police had gone to the sheriff's department within days after the attack to report that Allen may have been responsible; the department, convinced that it had the right man, declined to investigate. Ten years later, while serving time, Allen confessed to the assault. Again, the sheriff's department was alerted and, again, no one acted; Avery remained in prison for another eight years. In light of this information, he filed a lawsuit against the county for thirty-six million dollars.

In 2005, while the defendants in that civil suit were being deposed, Avery was arrested again-this time for the murder of a twenty-five-year-old photographer named Teresa Halbach. Four months later, his sixteen-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, was arrested as well, after he confessed to helping Avery rape and murder Halbach and burn her body. In 2007, after separate trials, both were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Ricciardi and Demos examine those convictions in "Making a Murderer," and the information they present has led viewers to respond with near-universal outrage about the verdicts. Because of the pending civil litigation, the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department was supposed to have nothing to do with the Halbach investigation beyond lending any necessary equipment to the jurisdiction in charge. Yet members of the department were involved in the case at every critical juncture. One of them was allegedly left alone with Halbach's vehicle for several hours after it was located and before Avery's blood was discovered inside. Another found the key to Halbach's S.U.V. in Avery's home-in plain view, even though the property had previously been searched by other investigators six times. A third found a bullet fragment in Avery's garage, again after the premises had been repeatedly searched. The analyst who identified Halbach's DNA on that bullet had been instructed by a county detective to try to come up with evidence that Halbach had been in Avery's house or garage. Perhaps most damning, the defense discovered that a vial of Avery's blood, on file from the 1985 case, had been tampered with; the outer and inner seal on the box in which it was kept had been broken, and the vial itself had a puncture in the top, as from a hypodermic needle.

That is sobering stuff, but the most egregious misconduct shown in the documentary concerns not Avery but his nephew, Brendan Dassey-a stone-quiet, profoundly naïve, learning-disabled teen-ager with no prior criminal record, who is interrogated four times without his lawyer present. In the course of those interrogations, the boy, who earlier claimed to have no knowledge of Halbach, gradually describes an increasingly lurid torture scene that culminates in her murder by gunshot. The gun comes up only after investigators prod Dassey to describe what happened to Halbach's head. Dassey first proposes that Avery cut off her hair, and then adds that his uncle punched her. Finally, one of the investigators, growing impatient, says, "I'm just going to come out and ask you: Who shot her in the head?" After the confession is signed, the prosecutor calls a press conference and turns Dassey's story into the definitive account of what happened-a travesty of justice for Dassey and Avery, given the questionable nature of the interrogation, and a terrible cruelty to the Halbach family.

Dassey repeatedly recanted his confession, including in a letter to the judge and on the witness stand. But it was too late. "Put the tape of his confession in the VCR or DVD player and play it, there's our case right there," Halbach's brother told the press. He was right, but he shouldn't have been. Most people find it impossible to imagine why anyone would confess to a crime he didn't commit, but, watching Dassey's interrogation, it is easy to see how a team of motivated investigators could alternately badger, cajole, and threaten a vulnerable suspect into saying what they wanted to hear. When Dassey's mother asked him how he came up with so many details if he was innocent, he said, "I guessed." "You don't guess with something like this, Brendan," she replied. "Well," he said, "that's what I do with my homework, too."

By chance, I have known many of the details of the Avery case since long before the release of "Making a Murderer," because in 2007 I spoke at length with Penny Beerntsen. At the time, I was working on a book about being wrong-about how we as a culture think about error, and how we as individuals experience it-and Beerntsen, in identifying Avery as her assailant, had been wrong in an unusually tragic and consequential way.

Beerntsen had also been unusual among crime victims involved in wrongful convictions in that she had instantly accepted the DNA evidence-and, with it, her mistake. "It ain't all her fault, you know," Avery had said at the time of his release. "Honest mistake, you know." But Beerntsen had felt horrifically guilty. "This might sound unbelievable," she told me when we first talked, "but I really feel this way: the day I learned I had identified the wrong person was much worse than the day I was assaulted. My first thought was, I don't deserve to live." She wrote Avery a letter, apologizing to him and his family, and, concerned by the missteps and misconduct that led to his incarceration, became involved with the Innocence Project, which seeks to free the wrongfully convicted and to reform legal practices to help prevent miscarriages of justice.

Given her history, Beerntsen does not need any convincing that a criminal prosecution can go catastrophically awry. But when Ricciardi and Demos approached her about participating in "Making a Murderer" she declined, chiefly because, while her own experience with the criminal-justice system had led her to be wary of certitude, the filmmakers struck her as having already made up their minds. "It was very clear from the outset that they believed Steve was innocent," she told me. "I didn't feel they were journalists seeking the truth. I felt like they had a foregone conclusion and were looking for a forum in which to express it."

Ricciardi and Demos have dismissed that idea, claiming that they simply set out to investigate Avery's case and didn't have a position on his guilt or innocence. Yet "Making a Murderer" never provokes the type of intellectual and psychological oscillation so characteristic of Koenig and Snyder's "Serial." Instead, the documentary consistently leads its viewers to the conclusion that Avery was framed by the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department, and it contains striking elisions that bolster that theory. The filmmakers minimize or leave out many aspects of Avery's less than savory past, including multiple alleged incidents of physical and sexual violence. They also omit important evidence against him, including the fact that Brendan Dassey confessed to helping Avery move Halbach's S.U.V. into his junk yard, where Avery lifted the hood and removed the battery cable. Investigators subsequently found DNA from Avery's perspiration on the hood latch-evidence that would be nearly impossible to plant.

Perhaps because they are dodging inconvenient facts, Ricciardi and Demos are never able to present a coherent account of Halbach's death, let alone multiple competing ones. Although "Making a Murderer" is structured chronologically, it fails to provide a clear time line of events, and it never answers such basic questions as when, where, and how Halbach died. Potentially critical issues are raised and summarily dropped; we hear about suspicious calls to and messages on Halbach's cell phone, but these are never explored or even raised again. In the end, despite ten hours of running time, the story at the heart of "Making a Murderer" remains a muddle. Granted, real life is often a muddle, too, especially where crime is involved-but good reporters delineate the facts rather than contribute to the confusion.

Despite all this, "Making a Murderer" has left many viewers entirely convinced that Avery was framed. After the documentary aired, everyone from high-school students to celebrities jumped on the "Free Avery and Dassey" bandwagon. In the weeks since, people involved in the conviction have been subjected to vicious and in some cases threatening messages from Netflix-watching strangers. (So have people who were not involved, including the Manitowoc Police Department, a separate entity from the county sheriff's department.)

For those people, and for others close to the original case, "Making a Murderer" seems less like investigative journalism than like highbrow vigilante justice. "My initial reaction was that I shouldn't be upset with the documentarians, because they can't help that the public reacted the way that it did," Penny Beerntsen said. "But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, Well, yeah, they do bear responsibility, because of the way they put together the footage. To me, the fact that the response was almost universally 'Oh, my God, these two men are innocent' speaks to the bias of the piece. A jury doesn't deliberate twenty-some hours over three or four days if the evidence wasn't more complex."

"Making a Murderer" raises serious and credible allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the trials of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. It also implies that that misconduct was malicious. That could be true; vindictive prosecutions have happened in our justice system before and they will happen again. But the vast majority of misconduct by law enforcement is motivated not by spite but by the belief that the end justifies the means-that it is fine to play fast and loose with the facts if doing so will put a dangerous criminal behind bars.

That same reasoning, with the opposite aims, seems to govern "Making a Murderer." But while people nearly always think that they are on the side of the angels, what finally matters is that they act that way. The point of being scrupulous about your means is to help insure accurate ends, whether you are trying to convict a man or exonerate him. Ricciardi and Demos instead stack the deck to support their case for Avery, and, as a result, wind up mirroring the entity that they are trying to discredit.

Partway through "Making a Murderer," we hear a "Dateline NBC" producer discuss the death of Teresa Halbach in disturbingly chipper tones. "This is the perfect 'Dateline' story," she says. "It's a story with a twist, it grabs people's attention. . . . Right now murder is hot, that's what everyone wants, that's what the competition wants, and we're trying to beat out the other networks to get that perfect murder story."

That clip, presented without context, is meant to make the "Dateline" producer look shallow and exploitative, and it does. But it is also meant to inoculate Ricciardi and Demos against the charge that they, too, are pursuing a hot murder case with a dramatic twist in order to grab people's attention. The implication is that, unlike traditional true-crime shows-"Dateline," "48 Hours," "America's Most Wanted," "Nancy Grace"-their work is too intellectually serious to be thoughtless, too morally worthy to be cruel.

Yet the most obvious thing to say about true-crime documentaries is something that, surprisingly often, goes unsaid: they turn people's private tragedies into public entertainment. If you have lost someone to violent crime, you know that, other than the loss itself, few things are as painful and galling as the daily media coverage, and the license it gives to strangers to weigh in on what happened. That experience is difficult enough when the coverage is local, and unimaginable when a major media production turns your story into a national pastime. "Sorry, I won't be answering any questions because . . . TO ME ITS REAL LIFE," the younger brother of Hae Min Lee, the murder victim in "Serial," wrote on Reddit in 2014. "To you listeners, its another murder mystery, crime drama, another episode of CSI. You weren't there to see your mom crying every night . . . and going to court almost every day for a year seeing your mom weeping, crying, and fainting. You don't know what we went through."

Like the Lee family, the Halbachs and Penny Beerntsen declined to participate in a journalistic investigation into their personal tragedies. But no one in such a situation has any real way to opt out. "Making a Murderer" takes Halbach's death as its subject (her life is represented by a few photos and video clips, which do not rise above the standard mise en scène of murder shows), and footage of her family appears in almost every episode. Beerntsen, for her part, was dismayed to discover that the filmmakers had obtained a photograph of her battered face from the 1985 attack and used it without her knowledge. "I don't mind looking at it, but my children should not have to relive that," she said. "And everything we're dealing with, the Halbachs are dealing with a thousandfold."

This is not to suggest that reporting on violence is always morally abhorrent. Crimes themselves vary widely, as does crime coverage, and it is reasonable to hold that at some point the demands of private grief are outweighed by the public good. But neither "Serial" (which is otherwise notable for its thoroughness) nor "Making a Murderer" ever addresses the question of what rights and considerations should be extended to victims of violent crime, and under what circumstances those might justifiably be suspended. Instead, both creators and viewers tacitly dismiss the pain caused by such shows as collateral damage, unfortunate but unavoidable. Here, too, the end is taken to justify the means; someone else's anguish comes to seem like a trifling price to pay for the greater cause a documentary claims to serve.

But what, exactly, is that cause in "Making a Murderer"? As of January 12th, more than four hundred thousand people had signed a petition to President Obama demanding that "Steven Avery should be exonerated at once by pardon." That outrage could scarcely have been more misdirected. For one thing, it was addressed to the wrong person: Avery was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones, and the President does not have the power to pardon him. For another, it was the wrong demand. "Making a Murderer" may have presented a compelling case that Avery (and, more convincingly, Dassey) deserved a new trial, but it did not get anywhere close to establishing that either one should be exonerated.

The petition points to another weakness of "Making a Murderer": it is far more concerned with vindicating wronged individuals than with fixing the system that wronged them. The series presents Avery's case as a one-off-a preposterous crusade by a grudge-bearing county sheriff's department to discredit and imprison a nemesis. (Hence the ad-hominem attacks the show has inspired.) But you don't need to have filed a thirty-six-million-dollar suit against law enforcement to be detained, denied basic rights, and have evidence planted on your person or property. Among other things, simply being black can suffice. While Avery's story is dramatic, every component of it is sadly common. Seventy-two per cent of wrongful convictions involve a mistaken eyewitness. Twenty-seven per cent involve false confessions. Nearly half involve scientific fraud or junk science. More than a third involve suppression of evidence by police.

Those statistics reflect systemic problems. Eyewitness testimony is dangerously persuasive to juries, yet it remains admissible in courts almost without caveat. Some interrogation methods are more likely than others to produce false confessions, yet there are no national standards; fewer than half of states require interrogations to be videotaped, and all of them allow interrogators to lie to suspects. With the exception of DNA evidence (which emerged from biology, not criminology), forensic tests are laughably unscientific; no independent entity exists to establish that such tests are reliable before their results are admissible as evidence.

It is largely because of these systemic weaknesses in our judicial system that we find ourselves with a court of last resort. While that court cannot directly operate the levers of the law, it has drawn attention to cases that need review, and innocent people have been freed as a result. Yet in the decades since Erle Stanley Gardner launched his column, none of the forces that put those people in prison in the first place have changed for the better. Nor have we evolved a set of standards around extrajudicial investigations of criminal cases. However broken the rules that govern our real courts, the court of last resort is bound by no rules at all.

That does not automatically compromise independent investigations into crime; some remarkable and important work has been done in the tradition of the court of last resort. But it does enable individual journalists to proceed as they choose, and the choices made by Ricciardi and Demos fundamentally undermine "Making a Murderer." Defense attorneys routinely mount biased arguments on behalf of their clients; indeed, it is their job to make the strongest one-sided case they can. But that mandate is predicated on the existence of a prosecution. We make moral allowances for the behavior of lawyers based on the knowledge that the jury will also hear a strong contrary position. No such structural protection exists in our extrajudicial courts of last resort, and Ricciardi and Demos chose not to impose their own.

Toward the end of the series, Dean Strang, Steven Avery's defense lawyer, notes that most of the problems in the criminal-justice system stem from "unwarranted certitude"-what he calls "a tragic lack of humility of everyone who participates." Ultimately, "Making a Murderer" shares that flaw; it does not challenge our yearning for certainty or do the difficult work of helping to foster humility. Instead, it swaps one absolute for another-and, in doing so, comes to resemble the system it seeks to correct. It is easy to express outrage, comforting to have closure, and satisfying to know all the answers. But, as defense lawyers remind people every day, it is reasonable to doubt. ♦

Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award for " The Really Big One," her story on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. She is the author of " Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error."
Read more "

Fiction "Cat Person"

"It was a terrible kiss, shockingly bad; Margot had trouble believing that a grown man could possibly be so bad at kissing."

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Argosy began in 1882 as a magazine for children and ceased publication ninety-six years later as soft-core porn for men, but for ten years in between it was the home of a true-crime column by Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who gave the world Perry Mason.

# data[].attributes.headline
Video of Theresa talking about how she would like others to feel when she dies, put in the documentary with no real explanation other than to create questions

# data[].attributes.subject
Video of Theresa talking about how she would like others to feel when she dies, put in the documentary with no real explanation other than to create questions

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Teresa Halbach Video Diary | NBC26: The Avery Archives | Steven Avery on Netflix

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Teresa Halbach's video diary was played during Steven Avery's sentencing. What were Teresa's hopes and dreams? What did she love? NBC26 in Green Bay has gone through the news archives to bring you coverage of Steven Avery and the legal cases talked about in the Netflix documentary "Making a Murderer".