Netflix show Making a Murderer - Steven Avery case, etc

the thing that really riled me throughout was the da and his cohort talking about what a disgrace it was that the defence was accusing police officers of wrongdoing. like as if just by dint of being in the police, someone is a paragon of virtue. they seemed to keep reinforcing that point, as if a great police force is by necessity built on a refusal to even consider the fact that it could be corrupt - i mean obv corruption is guaranteed where you have public figures with power...

i've seen the staircase/paradise lost etc but the cops in this really came across far worse.

hmmm watched one hour of this stuff and can't imagine watching 9 more hours of it. not that i need 'suspense' to string me along but it felt like such an overview that i don't even know how to get motivated to watch any more of it.

well the first ep kinda is an overview of a huge period of time - the actual story develops after that...

hmmm watched one hour of this stuff and can't imagine watching 9 more hours of it. not that i need 'suspense' to string me along but it felt like such an overview that i don't even know how to get motivated to watch any more of it.

― i got a really big steen, and they need some really big zings (some dude), Saturday, December 26, 2015 7:01 AM (10 hours ago) Bookmark

breh you're out here watching every minute of the new rob lowe show you can find the time

yeah, the rest of the season isn't about reiterating the first episode. It's not even that much about what happens in the first episode.

the show's called "making a murderer" and there's not even any murder in the first episode ..................................

ah ok i thought the entire series was primarily about what they outlined in that one

My god this show. Can't get over Steven's "the poor always lose" quote. This shit is so heartbreaking

Did the first two of these over the weekend. What strikes me most about it is how malicious and dark but at the same time SMALL TIME the conspiracy (assuming it's that) seems to be. Like there's no bigger intrigue here, afaict, he wasn't a political figure or a double agent or someone who was going to bring down the governor, he was just a small town dude who some other small town dudes didn't like and wound up with an even bigger vendetta against him when he went after them for going after him.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jarettwieselman/making-a-murderer-burning-questions-answered?utm_term=.kqNxvan4p

started this i like it a lot

― #amazing #babies #touching (harbl), 20. december 2015 15:34 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ok i'm ashamed to admit i just binged it all instead of doing anything i was supposed to do. wow!

― #amazing #babies #touching (harbl), 21. december 2015 02:01 (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Nobody has mentioned how awesome these two posts are :) I watched eight episodes yesterday. So chilling.

i assume you've all seen paradise lost and the staircase... if not, they're both on youtube. make sure you find the paradise lost version where each episode is about 2 hours long or more.

both are about as good as this, and quite similar.

fucking hell, this was devastating. the slow realisation in the final episode that Steven and Brendan wern't going to be free by the end was awful.

also, Brendan's resemblance to Paul Dano as Brian Wilson was uncanny.

I'm sure that Teresa's brother was in full "Justice for Teresa" mode, but I found him a bit despicable in the documentary.

'we love the police!' is not a good look for anyone in this story for sure

yeah, could be that the prosecutor coached him in the tone to take in the media interviews?

condemning the victim's family is not really a feeling I trust, and may be my source of greatest unease wrt the documentary. but I suppose a respectful distance leaves us only with those very public comments made not long after a great trauma.

i found him more pathetic and sad than anything

like, his trauma was so great that he blinded himself from a broad obvious truth (that the case built against avery was at best deeply flawed and corrupted)

the narrative is that they were being dumb and throwing it around, including over the fire?

i'm #1 cat lover over here but stupid kids and small animals are not a good combination

forgot to respond to this, but it wasn't like that - he literally doused it in gasoline and threw it in the fire. and he was 20 when it happened, not just a "stupid kid". Avery's reputation was very well-earned, he'd done significant time for assault and apparently pointed his gun at family members during arguments - I have a lot of stories about that family, some of which I probably shouldn't share here. Even despite all the oddness that came about with this case (everyone here felt like the sheriff's department was taking some improper measures to make this as frictionless as possible) very few of us ever doubted it was him. For me the nail in the coffin was Avery's weird obsession with Halbach, calling her several times (and trying to mask the call) to come out to the salvage yard even though she had already told her boss that she didn't want to go back out there.

I believe Avery is guilty and it would take a LOT to convince me he wasn't (to be fair this doc seems to be converting a lot of locals who probably had the same attitude). It was pretty common knowledge around here that the police botched the investigation, but knowing some of these county employees personally I just feel there's no chance that she was killed by police - I guess I could buy that someone ELSE did it and tried to make it look like it was Avery but that seems pretty farfetched. I've only seen a couple episodes so far but it feels like a documentary in the Michael Moore sense; there's just so much footage, so many documents, so many weird statements out there, I don't think it would be particularly difficult to find this narrative.

honestly I've come away from what I've seen so far thinking it's completely possible he did it, but the police and prosecutors were so incompetent and motivated to get him to jail that they didn't bother to do anything correctly

I haven't gotten the impression that it's plausible the police killed Halbach. But their entire operation was so incredibly incompetent that there's no credibility to their investigation when they had such high stakes. Pushing Dassey into a story, to the point of his _defense investigator_ getting him to tell a narrative they had no facts to corroborate is gross. They decided to push some barely-competent kid into jail to make their job easier! That's not an improper measure, it's criminal.

That's the indictment here, for me -- the local cops have an idea of what trouble looks like in their community, people they keep an eye on due to repeat problems, but this entire idea that it's their job to pipe these people into jail as quickly as possible, regardless of evidence or investigation, is a problem that underlies a lot of the criminal justice system.

booming post mh

The one thing that seemed queasy to me was the depiction of the Halbachs and the ex-boyfriend. I mean, it's understandable why that happens, the lawyers explain that a failing of the police was to never investigate the ones closest to Theresa, but still. Perhaps it didn't need all those clips of the brother saying stupid stuff.

All in all, though, it's such a shocking story, told so incredibly well.

i guess who knows what the police told the brother and family, and obv it's a huge life trauma, but i still feel like anyone who so unswervingly backs the police, like as if all that matters is a certain conviction, of anyone, doesn't really come across very well. like there are some people who would never believe the police got anything wrong, ever. even after an exoneration. these people are a real problem in society.

basing this entirely on the staircase/making a murderer/paradise lost, ie in mostly ignorance of the us system, but do people criticise the system of having elected district attorneys? it does seem to breed some iffy characters.

Not District Attorneys, but Last Week Tonight had a segment on judicial elections:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poL7l-Uk3I8

still feel like anyone who so unswervingly backs the police, like as if all that matters is a certain conviction, of anyone, doesn't really come across very well.

agreed but this is pretty common when someone close dies - lately there's been a decent amount of 20-something OD'ing in the area and it seems every time the parents won't rest until whoever sold the so-and-so is caught and behind bars, as though that makes any difference

i interpreted the brother's blind faith in the police not as stupidity but as an example of the way you might bend your mind in order to cope with incredible grief

2005 was also a v diff time in American culture wrt attitudes towards police

forgot to respond to this, but it wasn't like that - he literally doused it in gasoline and threw it in the fire. and he was 20 when it happened, not just a "stupid kid".

is this manitowoc lore or is this actually what happened, though?

well, nobody knows for sure. I've heard the story at least a dozen times though, worth mentioning though that usually it's "him and his buddies", maybe Steve was the one that incinerated it but he was probably drunk and being egged on by whoever else was there. It's not inconsistent with the other stuff I've heard about him, not to mention some of the things I've heard or witnessed firsthand from other members of the family. Not that he's necessarily a sadist or a psychopath, just prone to making really bad decisions.

of all the bad decisions one could make, murdering a woman almost immediately after being freed from 18 years of wrongful incarceration (from which you stand to gain millions) is up there

he was out for about two years afterwards and got into plenty of other legal trouble

agree that the impending lawsuit was likely what drove the Sheriff's office into "get this guy no matter what" mode

but what other legal trouble? and whatever the legal trouble was, isn't there a big jump to murder? and wouldn't a "get this guy no matter what" mode contribute to said legal trouble?

I don't know for sure. My mother worked in the courthouse during those years and said that he was a frequent visitor, mostly incidents related to his girlfriend, at least one involving a firearm.

This is a good article if you're looking for some specific things that the doc left out. No hard evidence linking him to it but I think the truth is a far cry from the "there was no evidence whatsoever/all the evidence was planted" POV that seems to be going around a lot lately

I mean some of it is totally irrelevant (who cares if he had porn), but if the detail about his apparent obsession with Halbach was glossed over, that's a pretty big omission

Also if I remember correctly the "robbery" conviction was just him stealing a case of beer or something from a bar.

yeah, I agree that some of this was glossed over. And the porn thing is stupid, as you said. It's weird that the list includes the key, which was discussed pretty clearly in the doc. Doc spins the absence of Teresa's DNA on the key as odd, though it seems to me that avery could have washed the key before contaminating it himself.

6. The previous animal cruelty case involved a bonfire

this point is also a bit ridiculous

yeah - like if he had been accused of burying her they could say "as a child he loved digging sandcastles at the beach"

Is this "obsession" you've mentioned also largely anecdotal, local lore? The few *67 calls (2 or 3?) don't seem that damning to me. Or is there more to that?

And whether or not they played a role in Teresa's death, the police's behavior during the investigation was almost definitely criminal.

yeah that article was interesting but besides maybe the key it still leaves huge holes. like basically how did the murder happen? the prosecution based their case on the jury's memory of inadmissible evidence from dassey's coached confession.

Is this "obsession" you've mentioned also largely anecdotal, local lore? The few *67 calls (2 or 3?) don't seem that damning to me. Or is there more to that?

the question is why request a specific photographer, particularly one you'd successfully managed to creep out a few weeks prior? to the point of masking the call and requesting her under a different name? hard to believe that evidence was "planted" in any way and if he's being framed that seems like a really lucky break for whoever the real murderer was

he called two times using *67 to get her to come out, then once without, the prosecution's theory being that he didn't dial *67 because he knew she'd been murdered at that point and wanted to establish some sort of evidence that he didn't know at that point.

barf, that was a clunky sentence. but you know what I mean. I thought the idea that he'd randomly murdered some photographer was very strange but considering that 1) he knew who she was and 2) he specifically wanted her on the property makes it a little more beliveable

forgot to respond to this, but it wasn't like that - he literally doused it in gasoline and threw it in the fire. and he was 20 when it happened, not just a "stupid kid".
is this manitowoc lore or is this actually what happened, though?

― Sufjan Grafton, Thursday, December 31, 2015 12:09 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I read a facebook post this week by a woman who claims to have worked for the Manitowoc sheriff's dept from 1980-82. She says she actually took the cat call?

I don't know who killed Teresa but I cant shake the feeling her brother knows *something* about it. Some shaky reasoning:
1. Before the car is even found he says he's in 'the grieving process'
2. That whole "We LOVE cops!" was kind of weird.
3. His unwavering devotion to Steven's conviction as opposed to the truth.
4. He and the ex-boyfriend giving the camera to the woman who found the car.
5. Way too much denial about being on the property.
6. He deleted voicemail!!

oh and this:

http://www.tvguide.com/news/anonymous-to-help-exonerate-making-a-murderer-steven-avery/

I think my takeaway from this series isn't a lingering sense of wonder about whether Avery is guilty more than it is a lot of questions about how the court and justice systems work in practice. The three branches of government -- legislative, judicial, and executive each had a role to play (although the legislative part in the series is mostly related to reform of his previous mistreatment) and the courts and police were both rolling in the mud by the end.

Dassey's initial lawyer never really cared whether he was guilty, his entire job was to get the kid to stick to the story the police prodded him into creating, and plead guilty to get a timeline cemented so they could throw the book at Avery. I mean, without any story to tie the limited evidence together, they just picked the most pliable person who could have possibly seen the crime and threw him into an interview room (without a parent or lawyer) until they got what they wanted. I'm not sure who disgusts me more -- his first lawyer or the defense investigator who had the kid write out what happened that day and then threw it away and prodded him until he regurgitated something close to the prosecution's case.

It's kind of taken for granted that public defenders will end up with a rapport with the prosecutors they sit across from all the time, but where that could be a bridge to better negotiation, this case started with two prosecutions and no defense.

that doesn't even get into the news media churn and public response to their perfect "this guy spent time in jail for murder, but now he's committed murder, so maybe we should let the police decide who stays in jail" angle that is the unspoken undercurrent to the whole thing

it just comes down to giving people due process. regardless of anything, that must happen. regardless of avery's guilt or otherwise, it didn't happen. you can't run a legal system in that way. nobody can trust the police or the state that much - whether you're cynical about police or just accepting of human fallibility.