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If you have time...check out this clip from the Netflix series "Making a Murderer"

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If you have time...check out this clip from the Netflix series "Making a Murderer"

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For extra credit your group can add ONE post that shows you understand your topic.

BE CREATIVE!

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It hasn't even been three weeks since Netflix released its docuseries Making a Murderer, but the show has already prompted a dedicated fanbase, endless debates, plenty of criticism and two petitions.

Produced over the course of a decade, the series examines the case of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man who was famously exonerated for a sexual assault he did not commit - only to be accused (and convicted) shortly thereafter of murdering 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. Avery's teenage nephew, Brendan Dassey, was also found guilty in the murder.

The creators of the series, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi, had to fit 10 years' worth of news segments, interviews, trials, recorded phone calls, and police interrogation footage into a 10-episode series - which means some details were left out. The prosecutor and the county sheriff have accused the filmmakers of purposefully omitting key details and taking others out of context. But Demos and Ricciardi say it would "just be impossible" to include every fact in the series.

Here are a few significant details that didn't make it in:

There was additional DNA evidence pointing to Avery. According to prosecutor Ken Kratz, that is. He told Maxim that Avery's DNA was found under Halbach's trunk (though earlier he said it was found under the hood). "It wasn't blood. It was from his sweaty hands. Do the cops also have a vial of his sweat that they are carrying around? The evidence conclusively shows that Steven Avery's hand was under the hood when he insists he never touched her car," said Kratz.

Halbach's belongings were found on Avery's property. Kratz said her phone and camera were found 20 feet from Avery's door. "This isn't contested," he said. "It was all presented as evidence at the jury trial, and the documentary people don't tell you that."

Avery and Halbach knew each other. Halbach had been to Avery's home several times to photograph vehicles for Auto Trader magazine. When Avery set up an appointment with a photographer, he reportedly requested her specifically, saying, "Send the girl who was out here before." Kratz also told People that Halbach said she was "creeped out" by him.

Two jurors in the Avery trial had relatives working for the Manitowoc Sheriff's Department. One man had a son in the department, and another had a wife in the county clerk of court's office, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Dean Strang, one of Avery's lawyers, said the connections were known - but both the defense and prosecution had apparently used up their allotted juror dismissals.

The documentary received plenty of pushback before it was even released. According to BuzzFeed, the government "did certainly go out of their way to try and quash their documentary." In the fall of 2006, the state tried to subpoena the footage, so Demos and Ricciardi hired a lawyer of their own. "The state wanted any statement Steven made ... and statements by others who might have knowledge or claim to have knowledge about who was responsible for the death of Teresa Halbach," Ricciardi said. "It was a fishing expedition, and we really think it was an effort by the state to shut down our production."

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Here's What Was Left Out of 'Making a Murderer'

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It hasn't even been three weeks since Netflix released its docuseries Making a Murderer, but the show has already prompted a dedicated fanbase, endless debates, plenty of criticism and two petitions.

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WRITE 1-2 sentences explaining the cartoon

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WRITE a 1-2 sentence summary

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hirty years ago this summer, at 4.30 one Thursday afternoon, a 15-year-old schoolgirl called Dawn Ashworth set off from a friend's house in the village of Narborough, Leicestershire, and began to walk home. Dawn lived in the nearby village of Enderby, a few minutes' walk away, and chose to take a short-cut along a footpath known locally as Ten Pound Lane. And then she vanished. It was not until two days later that Dawn's body was found in the corner of a nearby field, covered in twigs, branches and torn-up nettles. The pathologist established that she had put up a considerable struggle before being raped and strangled.

The hunt for Dawn's killer was unlike any previous murder investigation, however: it was conducted with the help of a new science. The technique known as DNA fingerprinting was employed in a criminal investigation for the first time. Not only did this revolutionary technique lead, indirectly, to the killer being caught; it also prevented a grave miscarriage of justice. And it was employed in a manner that would, today, be likely to face resistance from some members of the public.

As soon as Dawn's body was found, the police realised that they were looking for a serial killer: two-and-a-half years earlier, another 15-year-old, Lynda Mann, had been murdered a few hundred yards from the scene of Dawn's murder. Lynda's clothes had been removed in the same manner as Dawn's, and she too had been raped before being strangled with her own scarf. Detectives also believed that the killer was a local man, someone who knew the area, and possibly knew Lynda.

Narborough and the surrounding villages were paralysed with fear. In an editorial headlined "Killer in our midst", the Leicester Mercury warned: "If we don't catch him it could be your daughter next." The vicar of Enderby, Canon Alan Green, urged the murderer to give himself up, "because at some time in the future you will have to face your creator and account for the terrible thing you have done".

While the police had been unable to find Lynda's killer, they quickly made an arrest after the discovery of Dawn's body.

Richard Buckland, a 17-year-old Narborough boy with learning difficulties, and who knew Dawn, appeared to have knowledge of some details of the crime that had not been made public. Under questioning he would repeatedly admit the crime, and then withdraw the admission. On 10 August he was charged with Dawn's murder, and appeared in court the following day.

Buckland refused to confess to the murder of Lynda, however. He was adamant that he was not guilty of that crime. The police, in their certainty that both girls' lives had been taken by the same person, were convinced he was lying.

Meanwhile, five miles north-west of Narborough, at the University of Leicester, geneticist Alec Jeffreys had made a remarkable - and quite accidental - discovery during a failed experiment to study the way in which inherited illnesses pass through families. He had extracted DNA from cells and attached it to photographic film, which was then left in a photographic developing tank. Once extracted, the film showed a sequence of bars: Jeffreys quickly realised that every individual whose cells had been used in the experiment could be identified with great precision. Furthermore, the technique could be used to determine kinship.

After publishing an academic paper on his discovery, Jeffreys had been asked to assist with a number of cases in which children were being denied British citizenship because immigration officials were disputing that they were the offspring of British parents. But DNA fingerprinting had yet to be used in a criminal investigation. When Jeffreys gave his first talk about his discovery and suggested that it could be used to apprehend criminals, some in the audience had laughed out loud.

But after Buckland's court appearance, Jeffreys received an unexpected call from the police, asking him whether his new science could prove that the youth had murdered Lynda as well as Dawn.

Jeffreys agreed to carry out tests on Buckland's blood and on semen taken from the dead girls' bodies, and worked through the night to finish the work. When he took the film from the developing tank, he could see immediately that the girls had been raped by the same man - and also that Buckland's DNA was completely different. He had to tell the police that although they were correct in their belief that one man had raped and murdered both girls, not only had Buckland not killed Lynda, he had not killed Dawn either.

The police were astonished, and initially reluctant to believe what they were hearing. Jeffreys' test was repeated, and then run a third time. "One minute we got the guy," the senior investigating officer is said to have muttered, "and the next we've got Jack shit."

Buckland, clearly innocent, was set free - after more than three months in custody - and the police were back at square one in their hunt for a highly-dangerous double killer.

The following month, the detectives decided that the technology that had exonerated Buckland should be used to catch the killer. They would screen the entire neighbourhood: they would set up an operation to gather the DNA of every man in the area. Letters were sent to every male born between 1953 and 1970, who had lived or worked in the Narborough area in recent years, asking them to agree to give a blood sample. Two testing centres were established, in a local school and a council office, and there were two testing sessions, morning and evening, three days a week. Each man was expected to bring proof of identity.

It was a voluntary scheme, and a few men declined, some saying they did not like needles, one or two saying they did not like police officers. But most of these men soon changed their minds. The horror at the crimes - and the fear that the killer could strike again - resulted in those with reservations coming under considerable social pressure. By the end of the month, around 1,000 men had volunteered to give samples, and the forensic science laboratories that were conducting the tests were struggling to keep up.

The process quickly drew national and international attention. "Police investigating the murders of two teenage girls near this small Midlands village are applying a new scientific technique," reported the Los Angeles Times. "Some predict [it] could be the most significant breakthrough in resolving serious crime since fingerprinting was invented."

There were complaints from some, with the National Council for Civil Liberties - as the UK rights group Liberty was formerly known - highlighting the risk of human error and suggesting that parliament needed to consider the implications of mass screening programmes. But as the LA Times put it: "A strong sense of community outrage among close-knit villagers and an effective police public relations campaign effectively overcame apprehensions among some residents that the tests were an invasion of their personal rights."

After eight months, 5,511 men had given blood samples and only one had refused. But there was no match with the semen samples. Police began to expand the hunt.

Among those who were recorded as having given a sample was Colin Pitchfork, a 27-year-old baker and father of two young children. Three years earlier, he had been questioned about his movements on the evening that Lynda had been murdered. He had said, quite correctly, that he had been looking after his young son.

In August 1987, more than a year after the killing of Dawn, one of Pitchfork's workmates, a man called Kelly, was having a pint with a few friends in a pub in Leicester. The conversation turned to Pitchfork, and Kelly confessed that he had impersonated him, in order to take the blood test on his behalf. Kelly explained that Pitchfork had asked for this favour because he had already taken the test, for a friend who had a conviction for indecent exposure when he was younger. Pitchfork had doctored his passport, inserting Kelly's photograph, and then driven him to the test centre at the school, waiting outside while the blood sample was taken.

Six weeks later, one of the people in the pub relayed this conversation to a local policeman. Kelly was promptly arrested, and by the end of the day Pitchfork was also in custody. After reading him his rights, a detective asked: "Why Dawn Ashworth?"

Pitchfork is said to have shrugged and replied: "Opportunity. She was there and I was there."

He then gave a detailed confession to both murders and two other sexual assaults. When he raped and killed Lynda Mann, his car had been parked nearby, and his baby son had been asleep in the back of it. DNA testing confirmed him as the double killer.

The following January Pitchfork appeared at Leicester crown court, where he pleaded guilty to two counts of murder, two of rape, two of indecent assault and one count of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

The court was provided with a psychiatric report that recorded a "personality disorder of psychopathic type accompanied by serious psychosexual pathology" and warned that Pitchfork "will obviously continue to be an extremely dangerous individual while the psychopathology continues". He was sentenced to life imprisonment, and in accordance with the practice at that time, the home secretary, Douglas Hurd, set his minimum term: 30 years.

Although Jeffreys' work almost certainly saved Buckland from suffering a serious miscarriage of justice, Pitchfork's guilty pleas meant that DNA evidence was not relied upon by the prosecution, and this new science was not tested by the court. But the investigative potential of the technique was rapidly recognised and embraced by police forces around the globe. The Home Office took immediate steps to ensure sufficient numbers of technicians and forensic scientists were trained to allow DNA profiling to be incorporated routinely into police casework.

Over the last 30 years, according to some estimates, more than 50 million people have had their DNA tested during criminal investigations. It has secured the convictions of perhaps millions of criminals and, from time to time, excluded innocent suspects like Buckland, and overturned miscarriages of justice.

There have also been occasional mass DNA dragnets in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, the US and elsewhere, but in recent years, police forces have been less likely to use the mass screening programmes of the type that led, indirectly, to the apprehension of Pitchfork.

The Leicestershire detectives conceded at the time of their DNA sweep that while they were able to persuade thousands living in a small - and shocked - rural community to co-operate, they would not have encountered the same response if the murders had happened in a city.

Jeremy Gans, a professor at Melbourne Law School who has studied DNA dragnets, believes the main reason such sweeps are now uncommon may be because many countries have created large, standing DNA databases. "The police, like almost everyone else, think that if you're looking for someone who has committed a serious crime, you are looking for someone who has had prior contact with the police."

The first national DNA database was established in the UK in 1995. It currently holds 5.8 million DNA profiles based on samples taken from 5.1 million people - equivalent to almost 8% of the population.

Gans says that other reasons why DNA sweeps may no longer be deemed useful include the ease with which police can obtain DNA from suspects - such as by following them until they discard a soft drink can - and the development of the technique to the point where a match to a crime scene sample can be made through samples taken from relatives of the criminal.

It is also possible that police forces in the UK became less interested in gathering large numbers of samples following the introduction of new legislation in 2012 that provided for the eventual destruction of most DNA profiles based on samples taken from people who were not convicted of a crime. The law was introduced to address concerns that the retention of the DNA records of everyone who was arrested - regardless of whether they were eventually charged and prosecuted - risked undermining public support for the national DNA database.

Alec - by now Professor - Jeffreys had supported this reform. By this time, he had became known as the father of genetic fingerprinting. In 1994 he was knighted for services to science and technology and four years ago he retired from the university.

Friends of Lynda and Dawn, meanwhile, have set up a web page in memory of the girls. People from the area add their recollections, and use the site to lobby against the release of Pitchfork.

In prison, Pitchfork is said to have been well behaved, has been educated to degree level, and has become a specialist in the transcription of printed music into Braille. In April this year he appeared before the parole board, which recommended that he be moved to an open prison, but not released.

Not surprisingly, Lynda's mother, Kath Eastwood, was unimpressed. "He may have a degree," she told the Mercury, "but he is also a double child murderer and rapist. You can say he is a well-behaved prisoner, but don't ever forget that he is a well-behaved double child killer."

Strands of evidence: famous DNA cases

In 1990 Alec Jeffreys established that DNA taken from a femur recovered from a Brazilian graveyard was almost certainly that of Josef Mengele, a former SS officer and physician who subjected Auschwitz inmates to grotesque medical experiments. The match was made with samples taken from Mengele's relatives, who declined to accept his remains.

A year later scientists were able to prove that skeletal remains found in a burial pit in Yekaterinburg, 850 miles east of Moscow, were those of Russia's last tsar, Nicholas II, and his wife and children. They had all been killed in 1918, during the Russian civil war. Matches were made with samples taken from several people related to the family, including the Duke of Edinburgh.

In the US, at least 17 death row inmates have been freed after being exonerated by new DNA evidence. One of them, Henry McCollum, had served 31 years behind bars.

Familial DNA matches are increasingly bringing criminals to justice long after the crimes were committed. Last month Christopher Hampton, 64, was jailed for life at Bristol crown court after admitting that he had raped a 17-year-old girl and stabbed her to death in 1984. Samples taken from the crime scene were found to match DNA taken from Hampton's daughter after she was arrested during a domestic dispute.

This article was amended on 8 June 2016. An earlier version stated that Pitchfork had doctored Kelly's passport, inserting his own photograph. It was in fact the other way round: Pitchfork doctored his own passport, inserting Kelly's photograph.

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Killer breakthrough - the day DNA evidence first nailed a murderer

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It's 30 years since DNA fingerprinting was first used in a police investigation. The technique has since put millions of criminals behind bars - and it all began when one scientist stumbled on the idea in a failed experiment

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Students will pose ONE ethical question.
Can cite a reference for help (MUST provide a link to the article referenced)

Students will answer AT LEAST ONE other groups ethical question on Tuesday during open forum. (to be turned in on rubric)

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ARGUMENTS FOR:

A DNA database covering the whole population and every visitor to the UK, as advocated by Lord Justice Sedley, would save massive amounts of police time and help clear up crimes faster.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST:
It would be the ultimate step on the road to a 'Big Brother' state: Britain would become 'a nation of suspects'.

Whatever the utility of DNA samples, there is something inherently disturbing about entering every baby on a database at birth.

A national DNA bank would be massively expensive and bureaucratic.

It would be damaging to the image of the UK - 'Welcome to Britain: now provide a mouth swab'.

DNA information could be abused by corrupt police and others illegally passing information to unauthorised people.

Those who do nothing wrong have nothing to fear and should be reassured.

The current system - the DNA of all those arrested for recordable offences, guilty or not, is retained - is selective and inefficient.

Current practice is unfair: ethnic minorities and young people are over-represented, creating resentment and anti-police feeling. Two-in-five black men have their DNA on record, as against fewer than one-in-ten whites.

The world has changed: international mobility means that potential terrorists can come and go, often on false papers.

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Pros and cons of a compulsory DNA database

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ARGUMENTS FOR: A DNA database covering the whole population and every visitor to the UK, as advocated by Lord Justice Sedley, would save massive amounts of police time and help clear up crimes faster. ARGUMENTS AGAINST: It would be the ultimate step on the road to a 'Big Brother' state: Britain would become 'a nation of suspects'.

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Follow the link then launch the interactive game to make a fingerprint.

Students will give an example of the created fingerprint in a SEPARATE post

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DNA. It's what makes you unique. Unless you have an identical twin, your DNA is different from that of every other person in the world. And that's what makes DNA fingerprinting possible. Experts can use DNA fingerprints for everything from determining a biological mother or father to identifying the suspect of a crime. What, then, is a DNA fingerprint and how is it made? Here, you'll find out by solving a mystery-a crime of sorts. First, you'll create a DNA fingerprint (we'll supply the lab and all necessary materials). Then you'll compare this DNA fingerprint to those of all seven suspects to nab the perpetrator. Ready? Let's get to work!

Launch Interactive

Assemble a virtual DNA fingerprint and use it to identify the culprit in a hypothetical crime.

In the last 15 years, DNA has played an increasingly important role in our legal system. Tissue evidence is now routinely collected during criminal investigations in hopes that it will provide genetic clues linking suspected criminals to crimes.

DNA profiles help forensic investigators determine whether two tissue samples -- one from the crime scene and one from a suspect -- came from the same individual. Fortunately, the genetic comparison doesn't require that investigators look at all of the DNA found in the tissue samples. That would take months or even years. Instead, by marking a small number of segments of DNA in one sample and then checking for the presence or absence of those segments in the other sample, investigators can say with some assurance whether the samples are from the same person.

How do they do it? Investigators use chemicals to cut the long strands of DNA into much smaller segments. Each segment has a specific length, but all of them share the same repeating sequence of bases (or nucleotides). The chemicals cut the segments at the beginning and at the end of the repeating string of nucleotides, so one segment might be ATCATCATCATCATC, for example, while another might be ATCATC. (The DNA segments used in forensic investigations are, of course, much longer than this.)

Investigators use a process called gel electrophoresis to separate these repeating segments according to length. Next, they introduce a small set of radioactive "markers" to the sample. These markers are segments of DNA of known length, with bases that complement the code of, and bind to, sample segments of the same length. The sample segment above (ATCATCATCATCATC), for example, would be tagged by a marker with the complementary code TAGTAGTAGTAGTAG.

Markers that do not bind to sample segments are then rinsed away, leaving in place only those markers that bound to complementary sample segments. Photographic film, which darkens when exposed to the radioactive markers, identifies the location of all marked sample segments. This film, then, becomes the DNA "fingerprint" that forensic investigators analyze.

The final step is a relatively simple matter of lining up the sample profiles side by side and comparing them for the presence or absence of segments with particular lengths. The more segments the two samples have in common, the more likely it is that the samples came from the same person.

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DNA. It's what makes you unique. Unless you have an identical twin, your DNA is different from that of every other person in the world. And that's what makes DNA fingerprinting possible. Experts can use DNA fingerprints for everything from determining a biological mother or father to identifying the suspect of a crime.

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Check out this video on an introduction to DNA fingerprinting

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Check out this video on an introduction to DNA fingerprinting

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Put AT LEAST three facts you learned about the process of DNA fingerprinting

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Paul Andersen describes the process of DNA fingerprinting and DNA profiling. He explains how variability in STRs can be used to identify individuals. He explains the importance of DNA fingerprinting in forensics and paternity cases. Intro Music Atribution Title: I4dsong_loop_main.wav Artist: CosmicD Link to sound: http://www.freesound.org/people/CosmicD/sounds/72556/ Creative Commons Atribution License