Steve Avery's Justice System

It is very possible Steven Avery killed Teresa Halbeck. These are unpopular words to hear but they should be explored. And they have been. By the Manitowac police department. What hasn’t been explored is the possibility of another murderer.

Dean Strange and Jerome Buting, the defense attorneys of Steven Avery in Netflix’s wildly popular “Making a Murderer,” spent a lot of time talking about the “presumption of innocence” during the trial. The detectives and police department gathered evidence to support the presumption that Steven Avery committed the murder. As illustrated in the trial, no other person was investigated to this extent. Not Steve’s brother, nor Teresa’s brother, roommate, or boyfriend.

Civil Rights such as “innocent until proven guilty” and “due-process” exist for a reason. They exist to mitigate instances such as this where a clear confirmation bias could point jurors to one person and one person only.

Dean Strang and Jerome Buting

Confirmation bias is a popular tool of politicians and bloggers (and the general public on Facebook). The gun-rights debate is a good example of this. Every instance of gun-violence is used by those against the proliferation of guns while every instance guns being used to protect property is used by the opposing side (there are way more than 2-sides to the debate). All evidence for the opposition is discarded

Suppose you were being investigated for a crime and every time a police officer found a piece of evidence that might possibly correlate you to the crime they would document it and every time they found a piece of exculpatory evidence they suppressed it? If the jury only heard the evidence against you and all other evidence was hidden from both them and your defense attorneys, what are the odds of truth prevailing? This happens in our justice system ALL THE TIME.

Justice and truth are symbiotic. Truth is required for justice. A detective who hasn’t properly prepared his critical thinking abilities, something that’s important for the gathering of evidence that points to truth, can be fooled by anecdotes and weak correlations. A detective who doesn’t value truth whatsoever is a much more insidious being. People do this to themselves all day long, every day. They create a set of beliefs for themselves and spend their time using social media to share posts that confirm these beliefs. It’s sloppy thinking and it’s depressing to think about.

Ken Kratz, the prosecutor, claims the docu-series was one-sided and left out important evidence that helped the jury make the decision to convict. One piece of evidence was from an inmate who claimed Steven Avery made certain comments while incarcerated.  Is this the type of evidence we should be using to convinct people of murder? ANY prosecutor has bargaining power over inmates to release them from jail, give them special privileges, and/or lighten their sentences in exchange for certain testimony.

More important than the words of Ken Kratz, what does the Jury have to say for themselves? One said, “If they could frame Steven Avery, they could do it to me.”