Making a Murderer - Steven Avery story

[OttoVonBismarck]

And yeah, keep in mind Dassey has low IQ and the internet is very dedicated to buying into the documentary version that his "confession is coerced and nonsense" If Dassey had been cooperative with the prosecutors his testimony in court would've been heavily practiced and would've "looked a lot better." That's the reality of  how criminal cases work.

Would it have been fabricated or untrue? That's actually what a jury is for--to determine if they think a witness is giving false testimony.

Like Berk says, there was strong physical evidence against Avery. While it's easy to paint the prosecutor as a "bad guy", not only for this case but for ethical violations he later committed in his career, the reality is he was basically right when he recently said to the media that most of what was used to convict Avery was physical evidence that wasn't really contradicted or even covered by the documentary filmmaker.

If you read interviews with the filmmakers they repeatedly insist they spent ten years of their lives on this and were dedicated to being impartial. But it's hard for me to buy into that based on what they chose to include and not to include, how they chose to present it, and how when they chose to include negative things about Avery they always worked to mitigate it. For example the animal cruelty incident, if you just watch the documentary they make it sound like he accidentally burned his cat. In real life he doused his cat in an accelerant and threw it into a bonfire so he could laugh at it as it burned to death. Again--he shouldn't have been convicted of murder for killing a cat years before, but if the filmmakers were really neutral they wouldn't have chosen to present things the way they did.

[Razgovory]

I've investigated this closely and have a few things to note:

Yeah, I read the same article you did.  Of course not all the things "they left out" weren't actually left out.  For instance the pointing the gun at a female relative was brought up in the very beginning.

[Berkut]

Yeah, one of the defenses that filmmakers made when the prosecutor bitched about the evidence they didn't include was that they didn't have time to cover every single thing at the trial.

I dunno - I think they maybe could have shown me a couple fewer instances of Steve's mom making her lunch and used that time for more evidence coverage...if they really wanted to...

[OttoVonBismarck]

Yeah, I read the same article you did.  Of course not all the things "they left out" weren't actually left out.  For instance the pointing the gun at a female relative was brought up in the very beginning.

Yeah, there's an article going around that summarizes most of the important stuff.

But I'm actually a big "True Crime" guy, always have been. I've been active on WebSleuths for years, and this case was discussed very highly there like 10 years ago. Websleuths often cover cases that later become famous because of documentaries long before hand because they have a lot of people who essentially nerd out of interesting criminal cases. Almost all this stuff is public record, it just requires dedicated people willing to dig into it and share it online, which is a lot of what happens on websleuths.

[The Minsky Moment]

I do think the documentary went out of its way to portray Dassey's original lawyer badly.

Now, I get that it seemed kind of shitty that his lawyers was REALLY pushing him to take a plea deal. But here is the thing - it turns out he was right. The evidence against Avery was compelling, and sticking to his confession (which I am sure the lawyer knew would be pretty persuasive to a jury even if it was later rescinded) and testifying against Avery was the smart move, in return for a plea deal.

And it is quite common that a lawyer strongly recommends a plea deal, and has to overcome client reluctance to do so out of a desire to "prove innocence" or "get his day in court".  Conviction rates are typically high and sentences can be harsh, the cost of a day in court can be very high in terms of later time served.

That said, it was reported that Dassey's lawyer allowed an interrogation proceed without his presence.  If true that is hard to explain and goes beyond mere plain talk to a client to be realistic about prospects.

[Razgovory]

There was a reason why the prosecution didn't use the confession directly in Avery's case, it was nonsense.

He refused to testify. It is pretty hard to use a confession from someone who isn't willing to actually testify that the confession is real. If you have adequate evidence to secure a conviction otherwise, it would be incredibly foolish to include a confession from someone who the defense can put on the stand and refute it - it makes it then seem like your case *IS* the confession, which is being denied by the person confessing!

While there are problems with the confession, those problems are not why it wasn't used - it wasn't used because Dassey would make a terrible witness, if he wasn't willing to cooperate.

If you have such a problem with the confession then why use it as the basis for your theory of the crime?  I mean the whole point of the exercise was to find someone to implicate Mr. Avery.  That's what the dectives wanted, that's what the prosecutor wanted and most bizarrely that's what the Dassey's attorney wanted.  I think the prosecutor was well aware that Avery had pretty good defense attorneys, while Dassey had to make do with public defender.

[Berkut]

There was a reason why the prosecution didn't use the confession directly in Avery's case, it was nonsense.

He refused to testify. It is pretty hard to use a confession from someone who isn't willing to actually testify that the confession is real. If you have adequate evidence to secure a conviction otherwise, it would be incredibly foolish to include a confession from someone who the defense can put on the stand and refute it - it makes it then seem like your case *IS* the confession, which is being denied by the person confessing!

While there are problems with the confession, those problems are not why it wasn't used - it wasn't used because Dassey would make a terrible witness, if he wasn't willing to cooperate.

If you have such a problem with the confession then why use it as the basis for your theory of the crime? 

I don't think it was - they threw out the charges related to Dassey's testimony.

He wasn't even convicted of rape, for example.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I actually got turned onto crime stories based on a case from the 80s here in Virginia, the Roger Keith Coleman case. I was 100% convinced at the time he was innocent, and that Virginia ultimately executed an innocent man. There's a great book that was written about it in the early 2000s called "May God Have Mercy" at the time I remember reading it and just being super amazed that this man was both convicted, and executed, when it was so clear that prosecution had acted improperly and that important exculpatory evidence was never heard in court.

When Coleman was executed they didn't really have full DNA testing, but they could test the semen found in the victim for blood type. It was a rarer type, and matched Coleman. But blood type isn't a finger print, millions and millions of people share the same blood type (billions for some of the more common types.) That was the one thing in the book that was really negative toward Coleman.

In the mid-2000s, Governor Mark Warner finally ordered that modern DNA testing be done. Based on my following the case closely at the time of his execution in the early 90s, the reading of the book and etc, I was basically convinced that it'd be the first instance in modern legal history in which an executed person was definitively proven to have not been guilty. When the DNA testing came back, instead it showed that Coleman raped the victim and thus it's all but certain her murdered her. He was justly convicted and executed. That was an important experience as a lay person in looking at criminal trials for me, because it kinda showed how easy it is to take a very selective look at evidence and make a trial court look stupid. To be frank I have a lot more respect for the mountains of evidence that juries look at now, and how even a 400 page book is really barely a synopsis of the real proceedings that went on in the court room, and that we should have a strong presumption that if someone was convicted by a jury of 12 peers they probably did it, and only extraordinary evidence should lead us to think otherwise.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I do think the documentary went out of its way to portray Dassey's original lawyer badly.

Now, I get that it seemed kind of shitty that his lawyers was REALLY pushing him to take a plea deal. But here is the thing - it turns out he was right. The evidence against Avery was compelling, and sticking to his confession (which I am sure the lawyer knew would be pretty persuasive to a jury even if it was later rescinded) and testifying against Avery was the smart move, in return for a plea deal.

And it is quite common that a lawyer strongly recommends a plea deal, and has to overcome client reluctance to do so out of a desire to "prove innocence" or "get his day in court".  Conviction rates are typically high and sentences can be harsh, the cost of a day in court can be very high in terms of later time served.

That said, it was reported that Dassey's lawyer allowed an interrogation proceed without his presence.  If true that is hard to explain and goes beyond mere plain talk to a client to be realistic about prospects.

O.J.'s attorneys allowed the same thing.

[Berkut]

I do think the documentary went out of its way to portray Dassey's original lawyer badly.

Now, I get that it seemed kind of shitty that his lawyers was REALLY pushing him to take a plea deal. But here is the thing - it turns out he was right. The evidence against Avery was compelling, and sticking to his confession (which I am sure the lawyer knew would be pretty persuasive to a jury even if it was later rescinded) and testifying against Avery was the smart move, in return for a plea deal.

And it is quite common that a lawyer strongly recommends a plea deal, and has to overcome client reluctance to do so out of a desire to "prove innocence" or "get his day in court".  Conviction rates are typically high and sentences can be harsh, the cost of a day in court can be very high in terms of later time served.

That said, it was reported that Dassey's lawyer allowed an interrogation proceed without his presence.  If true that is hard to explain and goes beyond mere plain talk to a client to be realistic about prospects.

I thought the more problematic part was the lawyers investigator basically brow beating Dassey into drawing pictures of the crime and such. I mean hell, that was HIS lawyer's representative pretty much acting like a prosecutor!

But yeah, I cannot imagine what possible reason a defense attorney would ever agree to letting his client be interviewed without his presence, especially one as clearly incapable of holding his own as Dassey.

[The Minsky Moment]

O.J.'s attorneys allowed the same thing.

Very different circumstances.

[Razgovory]

I do think the documentary went out of its way to portray Dassey's original lawyer badly.

Now, I get that it seemed kind of shitty that his lawyers was REALLY pushing him to take a plea deal. But here is the thing - it turns out he was right. The evidence against Avery was compelling, and sticking to his confession (which I am sure the lawyer knew would be pretty persuasive to a jury even if it was later rescinded) and testifying against Avery was the smart move, in return for a plea deal.

And it is quite common that a lawyer strongly recommends a plea deal, and has to overcome client reluctance to do so out of a desire to "prove innocence" or "get his day in court".  Conviction rates are typically high and sentences can be harsh, the cost of a day in court can be very high in terms of later time served.

That said, it was reported that Dassey's lawyer allowed an interrogation proceed without his presence.  If true that is hard to explain and goes beyond mere plain talk to a client to be realistic about prospects.

The attorney also perjured himself before the court, and stated that his own client was "morally and legally" responsible on camera before even meeting his client (though after he had been assigned to the case).

[Razgovory]

I don't think it was - they threw out the charges related to Dassey's testimony.

He wasn't even convicted of rape, for example.

He wasn't convicted of burning the body either.  Do you remember if at any time during Avery's trial they said or suggest he wasn't acting alone?

[LaCroix]

But there is an argument made in "The Gift of Fear", a book largely about feelings of unease about certain creepy people, that this intuition is frequently very accurate in indicating we're dealing with a violent or dangerous person, and that you should follow that intuition.

for example, the DA, ken kratz, has narcissistic personality disorder 

@thread: probably guilty. re: dassey. dassey appealed the coerced confession claim and lost. i also didn't buy the experts who discussed his susceptibility on the tail end of the documentary. i believe what they said was true, but that it didn't apply to dassey. there was intelligence there, even if there wasn't much. this wasn't a happy down syndrome on the stand. he took regular school courses and played school sports.

re: documentary's agenda. while it's clear the creators are doing what otto says, the documentary does try its damnedest to show avery as a really freakin' nice guy. the very first episode spends a lot of time on this, and then you have avery's "aw shucks" taped prison comments littered throughout the series. in episode 9(?), the documentary notes that "hours of dassey's interrogation were never shown to the jury, including dassey telling his mother that police 'got to [his] head.'" i had read the wisconsin appellate case before this episode, so i knew about the "got to my head" comment. dassey's attorneys were the ones who chose not to show it, and they did that because the rest of that "got to my head" conversation contained comments that seemed to suggest it was part of an admittance of guilt. so, the documentary creators took it out of context and threw it into the documentary without any explanation. that evidenced what i figured about a lot of the evidence presented in the documentary.

but, despite the bias, i think it's a fun show.

[garbon]

we should have a strong presumption that if someone was convicted by a jury of 12 peers they probably did it, and only extraordinary evidence should lead us to think otherwise.

I'm not sure I would draw that conclusion. Your anecdote doesn't make me think jurors have super truth determining skills.