The subgenre of documentaries that deal with crimes in which the wrong person is on trial and convicted (unfortunately) keeps growing. It means that too often police work is not done properly, evidence is insufficiently researched and too much significance is given to statements by witnesses. The Thin Blue Line revealed that already, but others did so too, documentaries like Murder on a Sunday Morning, A Murder in the Park, The Central Park Five, The Staircase, Give Up Tomorrow or films about “The Memphis Three” ( Paradise Lost and West of Memphis ). Last month, Netflix released the ten-part documentary series Making A Murderer which revolves around the case of Steven Avery.
Avery has spent 18 years in prison for sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beernsten. He has always maintained his innocence, had an alibi for the day of the attack and continued to fight for his release. Finally he managed to succeed and he starts a lawsuit against the police Manitowoc County to be financially compensated. While that lawsuit is ongoing Teresa Halbach, who photographs cars for her work and was at Steven Avery that day, disappears. Without much research the police decides to arrest Avery and lock down the junkyard to do research. Because the lawsuit is still ongoing a decision is made to keep the local police out of the investigation, but somehow they still go ahead and help and suddenly find crucial evidence against him. He is suspected of murder and the trial against him begins. Once again, he insists he is innocent.
Directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos decided to film the case in response to a newspaper article and continued to follow it over several years. They were the only ones allowed access to family and lawyers to film them and interview them. The end result is a series that makes it clear that there are many points in this case that seem fishy and that there should be enough to have doubts about the guilt of Avery.
Visually this series doesn’t look very appealing. A lot of the material is not HD quality, but that does not matter in this case. It has been extremely well edited, making the court case itself very interesting and it is able to keep surprising you. It is a very subjective and mostly one-sided documentary, which highlights the Avery side of the story. As a lot of people have watched the show, quite a few of them started investigating themselves and it appears that the specific evidence was left out of the series, evidence which could change your opinion about Avery. Personally I don’t have a problem with that because really no documentary is objective. Werner Herzog worded it nicely. If you look at the phone directory of New York that is something objective, but it only becomes interesting once you tell the story behind the numbers (and thereby forming the story). Ricciardi and Demos have certainly succeeded in doing that, given the attention this case is now getting. A documentary series which is really worth watching.
This doc fascinated and infuriated me. One thing is 100% clear, and that’s the fact that Avery did not get a fair trial and there’s no way he was guilty without reasonable doubt. I researched this a lot after watching. Like you said, some evidence is left out, it’s nothing really damning, in my opinion. I don’t think Avery is a good guy by any means, but I lean towards him being not guilty for this crime. Great write up!
Yeah, it does that indeed. Exactly, looking at what is presented in this documentary I would also say there would be doubt.
I’m still on the fence about this guy. Evidence about his infatuation with the girl and his sweat on the car was oddly omitted from the doc. Too much seems fishy, but it’s undeniable that he had an unfair trial.
Yeah, definitely some things were strange during this trial