Netflix Making a Murderer
- Thread starter timster
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Or...what an interesting series on how the documentary industry always leaves out pertinent information to craft an agenda.
Yeah, especially utilizing testimony that was force fed to a minor, mentally impaired, to lead off the case
Justice
Justice
I got the impression the series wasn't as much about guilt or innocence as much as the system. The handling of the kid was the most troubling for me. From the interrogations to his initial defense team it's hard to see how the system has nothing in place other that giving benefit of the doubt to law enforcement and just moving on.
It's also troubling to me they felt Avery was guilty of murder but not guilty of mutilating the body. without being in the room I would guess it was more a negotiation than a deliberation. You vote guilty of murder we'll vote not guilty of mutilation.
Jurors absolutely do negotiate. I think a large part of why those deliberations are secret is that folks would be appalled if they saw the sausage being made...and their confidence in our legal system would drop significantly.
And that's just the jury. The stuff prosecutors and police do is pretty heinous sometimes.
And no, there isn't much of an answer, humans be humans, and all you can do is mitigate by having strong rules/laws that try and keep it as fair as possible, and by prosecuting violators but that last bit we rarely do.
I'm not sure that Steven Avery is innocent.
That aside, the conduct of this prosecutor and the Sheriff's dept. was abhorrent. Say what you want about Steven Avery (guy sounds messed up), but there's no way that the crime happened the way they say it did.
But the real crime here is the way that Brendan Dassey was railroaded. I can't believe that the testimony/evidence from his "defense" attorney was allowed as evidence. There was no real evidence connecting Dassey to the crime other than these confessions that were fed to him. I mean, he "confessed" to slitting this woman's throat on the bed, and yet there's no blood in that room . . and the mattress is still there.
When I was in law school, I worked for a (now pretty notorious) prosecutor's office. The conduct in that documentary blows my mind. I've never seen anything like it. People wouldn't be comfortable with how close many prosecution attorneys are with judges, public defenders, etc. . . . but this is well beyond anything I've ever seen. Just crazy stuff.
That aside, the conduct of this prosecutor and the Sheriff's dept. was abhorrent. Say what you want about Steven Avery (guy sounds messed up), but there's no way that the crime happened the way they say it did.
But the real crime here is the way that Brendan Dassey was railroaded. I can't believe that the testimony/evidence from his "defense" attorney was allowed as evidence. There was no real evidence connecting Dassey to the crime other than these confessions that were fed to him. I mean, he "confessed" to slitting this woman's throat on the bed, and yet there's no blood in that room . . and the mattress is still there.
When I was in law school, I worked for a (now pretty notorious) prosecutor's office. The conduct in that documentary blows my mind. I've never seen anything like it. People wouldn't be comfortable with how close many prosecution attorneys are with judges, public defenders, etc. . . . but this is well beyond anything I've ever seen. Just crazy stuff.
Agree
He may be guilty but from what I saw...Prosecution did not Prove Beyond a Reasonable Doubt to me
Kachinsky should be tarred and feathered
He may be guilty but from what I saw...Prosecution did not Prove Beyond a Reasonable Doubt to me
Kachinsky should be tarred and feathered
The handling of BD is very very troubling.
Agree, not convinced SA didn't do it but it seems kind of impossible to have happened the way prosecutors say it did. Plenty of blood from her in the Rav, along with his dna but nothing in his trailer and just a bit on a slug in the garage. I get people can bleed in differant ways, but from my days hunting deer, stabs, throat slashing and 11 gun shots produces more that a tiny bit of dna on one small bullet fragment.
But then that's reasonable doubt I would think.
In my experience, reasonable doubt is a harder concept to grasp then you might think...not just for juries, but for attorneys. I've tried to explain it by using lower standards as a defense counsel (e.g. "clear and convincing evidence" is a lower burden of proof than "beyond reasonable doubt"). As a prosecutor, I've tried to focus on the "reasonable" part of reasonable doubt, and noted that it doesn't mean removing all possible or theoretical doubt. But you really end up with a somewhat subjective concept of what "reasonable" means, and you end up with some jurors who think it means "probably did it" on one extreme to others requiring advanced CSI techniques and proof it wasn't aliens who did it on the other extreme.
I've seen plenty of otherwise good attorneys on both sides struggle somewhat to effectively capture the concept and explain it to the jury. I think the defense in the Zimmerman case did a very good job explaining it from a defense perspective for example. It's a key part of a trial that attorneys often gloss over in preparation and instead focus on the facts, but facts help win cases, but often they don't do it alone.
so it looks like the conviction of Dassey has been overturned, for now. Man, 11 years in prison, not being released as I understand it, and may have to go through the whole process again.
I get what you're saying, reasonable and doubt together is a strange combination. I've had only one criminal situation in my life that was nolle prossed and expunged and while I had no concerns a jury would convict in the months before the prosecutor came to his senses, my attorney kept pointing out juries can be troubling, but we knew a jury would be far better than a judge, whose, how do I want say it, loyalty may lay more with the prosecutor than us.
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