For Your Consideration: What went wrong with Making a Murderer
Cue the outrage.
It happens every few years: we get a documentary that draws our attention to something so outrageous, we can’t help but be - well, outraged. 2009 brought us The Cove, 2012 brought us KONY 2012 and in December of 2015, we got Making a Murder.
Film graduate students Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos were at Columbia University when they read about Wisconsinite Steven Avery in the New York Times. They read about Avery’s 2003 exoneration from prison - DNA evidence not previously available cleared him of an assault he was charged with in 1985. By the time he was exonerated in 2003, he had watched 18 years of his life pass from behind bars.
It gets crazier from there. In 2007, Avery was once more headed for jail, but this time the sentence was for life - for the murder of a Manitowoc photographer, Teresa Halbach. It’s almost unbelievable to watch, but the fact that the documentary’s footage is comprised largely of newscasts, trial video and face-to-face interviews forces the viewer to believe that, yes, Steven Avery is going to jail again.
But Making a Murder isn’t really a story about Steven Avery returning to prison.
It’s about why he shouldn’t go to prison.
As the series progresses, the rage of the viewer increases. The horrifying footage of his learning-disabled nephew Brendan Dassy’s interrogation, Avery’s earnest phone calls to his family, assuring everyone of his innocence and victimization by the police, the videos of Avery’s parents as they plod through a hopeless and trance-like stupor after Avery’s second arrest are all meant to tangle the viewer into a web of emotional turmoil.
And that’s what happened: nearly 130,000 people signed a petition requesting the President to free Steven Avery. Since the petition received 100,000 signatures before 30 days had passed, the White House acknowledged it: no.
This is the great failure of Making a Murderer.
The series is replete with accusations by Avery’s defense team that police framed Avery. Footage from the trial is appalling: a forensics expert on the stand shrugs off a mistake that she made that contaminated DNA samples, among other things. It is clear that prosecutor Ken Kratz, the police and perhaps others were involved in some sort conspiracy against Steven Avery.
But why would this be?
Is it because everyone is angry that Avery was released from prison? Is it because these officers have a personal vendetta against Avery - perhaps one resulting from the lawsuit Avery won against the Manitowoc Sheriff’s Department? Or is it because the officers had enough information to know that Avery probably did kill Halbach, but wanted to ensure that he would go to prison for it?
Right now, no one on the outside knows.
Collectively, it seems people were so outraged that Avery was back in prison and so angry at the officers and prosecution putting him there that they forgot to take a step back and look at the bigger picture - and it’s the bigger picture that’s the most concerning.
What is wrong with our system that a man like Ken Kratz is put into a position of power during which he abuses prescription drugs and admits to sexual addiction and a narcissistic personality disorder?
During his time as prosecutor, a domestic violence victim Kratz was working with filed a police report against him, saying he was trying to pressure her into a sexual relationship. There may be no other official record of his misadventures in office, but it’s more than likely that Kratz had multiple victims. It’s just that only one is on the record, and it was only one that took his career down.
What is wrong with our system that a learning-disabled minor like Brendan Dassey was coerced into a testimony that was largely if not
completely false by law enforcement officials who knew exactly what they were doing - and who have appeared to suffer no consequences after?
What is wrong with our jury system that a juror with ties to the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department could sit with the other jurors and have a hand in deciding Steven Avery’s fate?
These are the questions that we should be asking. But it’s much easier to get caught up in the story of Steven Avery and banter about whether or not he’s innocent than it is to look back at our justice system and wonder, “How can we fix this?” Because, as anyone who’s been on the other side of it will tell you, it is broken.
Making a Murderer highlighted this system in a way, but in a way that made it look bad so that Steven Avery would look good. It’s obvious that it worked: the outrage surrounds Steven Avery still, instead of the system that produced the corruption we saw.
The documentary enlightened, but it did not uplift.
It may be wildly popular, but it fails in comparison to documentaries such as Supersize Me, An Inconvenient Truth and Bowling for Columbine. All of these documentaries challenged people - although Supersize Me was one man eating fast food for a month, it caused people to rethink their own dietary choices and the food industry that was providing them. Guns began disappearing - never to reappear - off K-Mart shelves after Bowling for Columbine was released. K-Mart wasn’t responsible for Columbine or gun violence in general, but someone had been moved enough to say, “What can we do to make sure this never happens again?” And even though not everything in An Inconvenient Truth is absolutely true, it galvanized a new generation into action that will hopefully preserve our planet, if not just make it a better place to live.
Making a Murderer had the potential to be another revolutionary documentary that spurred people into action, or at least into deeper thought about why our criminal justice system is the way that it is. But with social media hype largely about Steven Avery, it appears the documentary has failed to do anything monumental - yet. A huge leap still needs to be taken, a leap from feeling outraged at the system to actually changing the system. Whether or not Avery is guilty, his birthright in this country guarantees him a fair trial, something he has never had in his life.
Until we make that leap from outrage to change, there will only continue to be more cases like Avery’s - more fodder for documentary films, more cheap conversation in era where talk about change is as cheap as it is plentiful.
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