Making a Murderer (spoilers)

[Kandi1977]

I saw Avery got new lawyers from the innocence project a few days ago. Hope this case gets reviewed by the supreme Court, as there clearly was something fishy going on.

 

[awesome dawson]

Watched the first episode last week, thought it was bricke.

I imagine many would say the same thing after watching just one Saudi Sportswashing Machine game.

 

[Robbo]

I imagine many would say the same thing after watching just one Saudi Sportswashing Machine game.

Oooh, touché! Seriously though @Greg you should keep watching, it gets better and better.

 

[Rock Strongo]

The purchase of the handcuffs and leg irons is pretty revealing isn't it!!? Especially as his girlfriend was in prison at the time (wasn't she serving 7 months for a DUI charge?)

I can pick that apart pretty easily (is it a sure thing that he actually bought that stuff btw? was it presented at the trial?)
Cops finds out Avery had bought said stuff.
Cops sit down with Brendan Dassey.
Cops says "hey, didn't you guys tie her up and *struggle cuddle* her?".
Dassey goes "uhmmmm, no?".
Cops goes "are you suuuure? remember, correct answer gives you a treat."
Dassey goes "uhhhhmmmm, I don't know...yes?"

And ta-daaaa, there's your evidence that Teresa was not only raped, but also cuffed to the bed and as well. For me, this is how everything during this trial played out. Leave out Dassey's "confession" and the cops are left with nada.

So what if the caliber.22 round was from his rifle? He's been shooting that rifle around his house for many years I'd guess. As for finding Teresa's DNA on it...come on. I'll just mention the car key here, its whereabouts and lack of her DNA on it.
Ok so there's DNA on the bullet, but no DNA anywhere else in that garage? Impossible. Like someone said earlier, these guys are not Dexter.

Every single representative from the State, either was it from Manitowoc County Sheriff Dpt, experts or witnesses, where shredded to pieces by the defense attorneys. They faked documents right and left, unsustainable evidence where relied on as facts, but when it comes down to the closing statements none of this apparently matters, because planted evidence or not "Avery is guilty" - Ken Kratz.

As for the family being allowed to make a statement in front of a jury, that has nothing to do with the case and should not be allowed. It's an emotional plea to a group of people who are deciding whether a person is guilty of a crime or not.
Maybe I'm a bit confused here. Did they make their statement before or after the verdict? If it was after, but before sentencing, then I'm more open to it.

 

[Superted]

I thought it was after.

 

[Superted]

 

[Superted]

I read a really good theory the other day somewhere that made a brick ton of sense and now I can't remember where I saw it.

 

[Superted]

Alright here it is :

"The police didn't kill Theresa Halbach. Andrew Coborn located that RAV4 with the assistance of Mike Halbach and Ryan Hillegas who illegally trespassed onto the Avery Salvage Yard on the night of November 3rd 2005. Mike Halbach and Ryan Hillegas suspected something was up since the Avery Salvage Yard was the last place they knew Theresa visited on Oct.31st Halloween day. They went snooping on the property and found the car. They checked the car and found the key in the ignition and blood in the cargo area. Mike or Ryan removed the key from the ignition to ensure that no one could easily move the car off of the Avery property... freaked out about this huge discovery they call the Manitowoc Sheriffs Department. Andrew Coborn fielded the call that night and went out and met Ryan and Mike at the Salvage Yard so he could view the car for himself. Ryan and Mike show him the car and to be certain its Halbachs he "calls" in the plate number to dispatch. Coborn has to "call" in... instead of "radio" in... the plate number to Manitowoc dispatch because he wasn't in his police cruiser at the moment, but rather on foot and in the "field' on the Avery Salvage property. This mistake places Coborn at the scene and in contact with Halbachs RAV4... 2 days before it is officially located on November 5th, 2005, by Pam Sturm.... This is problematic for Coborn because all call and radio transmissions to dispatch are recorded and logged onto the Manitowoc Police server. Andrew Coborn is now operating outside of police protocol at a potential crime scene that he has no official directive to be at. He tells Mike Halbach and Ryan Hillegas to basically STFU about what they found and not mention to anyone that they were ever on the Avery Salvage property that night. Ryan or Mike turns the RAV4 key over to Andrew Coborn. Mike and Ryan are told to go home. Andrew Coborn then immediately calls Lt. James Lenk and briefs him about the discovery of the Halbach car and breaches of protocol he committed on the Avery property, also about Ryan Hillegas and Mike Halbach being there. Lt James Lenk realizing that Coborn's calling in Halbachs plate is a serious mistake with potential consequences orders Andrew Coborn to remove the license plate from Halbach's car and then report to him immediately.

 

[Superted]

What James Lenk and Andrew Coborn, or the others for that matter, don't realize at this point and are completely unaware of is that Bobby Dassey and Scott Tadych have kidnapped, raped, shot and then burned Theresa Halbach in the privacy of the gravel quarry off of Jambo Rd on Halloween evening. They choose to burn her body to dispose of their DNA evidence of the crimes. They hid Halbach's car in the rear of Avery Salvage and wiped it clean of their prints. I believe it is Scott Tadych's idea to secretly transport the cremains of Halbach from the gravel quarry and dispose them into Steven Avery's burn pit. Scott Tadych transports Halbach's cremains in secret by using one of Barb Jandas burn barrels from her yard. Scott Tadych fails to collect all of Halbach's cremains from the original burn site in the gravel quarry, thus leaving some behind that FBI investigators later find... but he also fails in making certain all of Halbach's cremains are out of Barb Jandas burn barrel after dumping them into Steven Avery's burn pit. This is why investigators found small bits of Halbach in Barb Jandas burn barrel. Thus making a total of three sites where Halbach's cremains are found. Scott Tadych and Bobby Dassey are unaware that Ryan Hillegas and Mike Halbach have found Theresas car on the property and that Lenk and Coborn are now involved and in play with their scheme. .........By shear colossal luck, two completely independent frame jobs targeting one man, Steven Avery were shaping up into the perfect storm. On one front, from Lenk and Coborn regarding the RAV4, ....and on the other unconnected front by Scott Tadych and Bobby Dassey regarding the cremains of Theresa Halbach. One party wasn't aware of the other's involvements at any point during the days leading up to the official discovery of Halbach's RAV4 at the Avery Salvage Yard hence why the investigation and murder trial made zero sense to anyone especially the Jury.

 

[Superted]

None of the evidence could be connected because it was all unrelated... everybody was guessing. But Buting and Strang had zeroed in on a part of it but couldn't fully form a solid defense to prove it. The Jury couldn't conceive that Manitowoc officers could have conspired to kill Theresa Halbach to frame Steven Avery as Ken Kratz insisted they had to if they wanted to follow the theory the defense presented of the frame up of Steven Avery by Manitowoc officials. And Ken Kratz was right... Imagine Scott Tadych's confused and utter relief when Steve Avery's blood was found in the Halbach car and the RAV4 key found in Steve Avery's bedroom..... he must have been like.... WTF?! A quote from Scott Tadych after Steven Avery is convicted of Theresa Halbach's murder.... "THIS IS THE GREATEST THING TO EVER HAPPEN" ..... We will see Scott, we will see....

 

[dawaxman]

I can pick that apart pretty easily (is it a sure thing that he actually bought that stuff btw? was it presented at the trial?)
Cops finds out Avery had bought said stuff.
Cops sit down with Brendan Dassey.
Cops says "hey, didn't you guys tie her up and *struggle cuddle* her?".
Dassey goes "uhmmmm, no?".
Cops goes "are you suuuure? remember, correct answer gives you a treat."
Dassey goes "uhhhhmmmm, I don't know...yes?"

And ta-daaaa, there's your evidence that Teresa was not only raped, but also cuffed to the bed and as well. For me, this is how everything during this trial played out. Leave out Dassey's "confession" and the cops are left with nada.

So what if the caliber.22 round was from his rifle? He's been shooting that rifle around his house for many years I'd guess. As for finding Teresa's DNA on it...come on. I'll just mention the car key here, its whereabouts and lack of her DNA on it.
Ok so there's DNA on the bullet, but no DNA anywhere else in that garage? Impossible. Like someone said earlier, these guys are not Dexter.

Every single representative from the State, either was it from Manitowoc County Sheriff Dpt, experts or witnesses, where shredded to pieces by the defense attorneys. They faked documents right and left, unsustainable evidence where relied on as facts, but when it comes down to the closing statements none of this apparently matters, because planted evidence or not "Avery is guilty" - Ken Kratz.

As for the family being allowed to make a statement in front of a jury, that has nothing to do with the case and should not be allowed. It's an emotional plea to a group of people who are deciding whether a person is guilty of a crime or not.
Maybe I'm a bit confused here. Did they make their statement before or after the verdict? If it was after, but before sentencing, then I'm more open to it.

Victim impact statement is made after verdict and it is for the judge to determine appropriate sentencing

 

[Rock Strongo]

Victim impact statement is made after verdict and it is for the judge to determine appropriate sentencing

Ok, thanks.

 

[awesome dawson]

New Yorker article about Making a Murderer below. Provides a balanced opinion of the documentary series.


Dead Certainty
How “Making a Murderer” goes wrong.
BY KATHRYN SCHULZ


First came “Serial,” co-created by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, which revisited the case of Adnan Syed, convicted for the 1999 murder of his high-school classmate and former girlfriend, eighteen-year-old Hae Min Lee. That was followed by Andrew Jarecki’s “The Jinx,” a six-part HBO documentary that, uncharacteristically for the genre, sought to implicate rather than exonerate its subject, Robert Durst. A New York real-estate heir, Durst was acquitted in one murder case, is currently awaiting trial in another, and has long been suspected in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen Durst.

The latest addition to this canon is Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’s “Making a Murderer,” a ten-episode Netflix documentary that examines the 2007 conviction of a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery. Like the prisoners featured in “The Court of Last Resort,” Avery is a poor man serving time for a violent crime that he insists he didn’t commit. The questions his story raises, however, are not just about his own guilt and innocence. Nearly seventy years have passed since Erle Stanley Gardner first tried a criminal case before the jury of the general public. Yet we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project—bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers—comes to serve as our court of last resort.

If you know anything about “Making a Murderer,” you know that Steven Avery has a particularly troubling and convoluted relationship with the criminal-justice system. In July of 1985, Avery was picked up by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department after a woman named Penny Beerntsen was brutally attacked while out for a run in a Wisconsin state park. Beerntsen, who had been conscious throughout most of the attack, deliberately sought to memorize her assailant’s features, and subsequently picked Avery out of both a photo array and a live lineup. At trial six months later, Avery was found guilty and sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. He served eighteen of those before being exonerated by DNA testing, a technology not available at the time of the trial. That DNA test also identified Beerntsen’s actual assailant: a man named Gregory Allen, who was, by then, imprisoned for another assault.

“Making a Murderer” raises serious and credible allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the trials of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. It also implies that that misconduct was malicious. That could be true; vindictive prosecutions have happened in our justice system before and they will happen again. But the vast majority of misconduct by law enforcement is motivated not by spite but by the belief that the end justifies the means—that it is fine to play fast and loose with the facts if doing so will put a dangerous criminal behind bars.

That same reasoning, with the opposite aims, seems to govern “Making a Murderer.” But while people nearly always think that they are on the side of the angels, what finally matters is that they act that way. The point of being scrupulous about your means is to help insure accurate ends, whether you are trying to convict a man or exonerate him. Ricciardi and Demos instead stack the deck to support their case for Avery, and, as a result, wind up mirroring the entity that they are trying to discredit.

Partway through “Making a Murderer,” we hear a “Dateline NBC” producer discuss the death of Teresa Halbach in disturbingly chipper tones. “This is the perfect ‘Dateline’ story,” she says. “It’s a story with a twist, it grabs people’s attention. . . . Right now murder is hot, that’s what everyone wants, that’s what the competition wants, and we’re trying to beat out the other networks to get that perfect murder story.”

Like the Lee family, the Halbachs and Penny Beerntsen declined to participate in a journalistic investigation into their personal tragedies. But no one in such a situation has any real way to opt out. “Making a Murderer” takes Halbach’s death as its subject (her life is represented by a few photos and video clips, which do not rise above the standard mise en scène of murder shows), and footage of her family appears in almost every episode. Beerntsen, for her part, was dismayed to discover that the filmmakers had obtained a photograph of her battered face from the 1985 attack and used it without her knowledge. “I don’t mind looking at it, but my children should not have to relive that,” she said. “And everything we’re dealing with, the Halbachs are dealing with a thousandfold.”

This is not to suggest that reporting on violence is always morally abhorrent. Crimes themselves vary widely, as does crime coverage, and it is reasonable to hold that at some point the demands of private grief are outweighed by the public good. But neither “Serial” (which is otherwise notable for its thoroughness) nor “Making a Murderer” ever addresses the question of what rights and considerations should be extended to victims of violent crime, and under what circumstances those might justifiably be suspended. Instead, both creators and viewers tacitly dismiss the pain caused by such shows as collateral damage, unfortunate but unavoidable. Here, too, the end is taken to justify the means; someone else’s anguish comes to seem like a trifling price to pay for the greater cause a documentary claims to serve.


But what, exactly, is that cause in “Making a Murderer”? As of January 12th, more than four hundred thousand people had signed a petition to President Obama demanding that “Steven Avery should be exonerated at once by pardon.” That outrage could scarcely have been more misdirected. For one thing, it was addressed to the wrong person: Avery was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones, and the President does not have the power to pardon him. For another, it was the wrong demand. “Making a Murderer” may have presented a compelling case that Avery (and, more convincingly, Dassey) deserved a new trial, but it did not get anywhere close to establishing that either one should be exonerated.

The petition points to another weakness of “Making a Murderer”: it is far more concerned with vindicating wronged individuals than with fixing the system that wronged them. The series presents Avery’s case as a one-off—a preposterous crusade by a grudge-bearing county sheriff’s department to discredit and imprison a nemesis. (Hence the ad-hominem attacks the show has inspired.) But you don’t need to have filed a thirty-six-million-dollar suit against law enforcement to be detained, denied basic rights, and have evidence planted on your person or property. Among other things, simply being black can suffice. While Avery’s story is dramatic, every component of it is sadly common. Seventy-two per cent of wrongful convictions involve a mistaken eyewitness. Twenty-seven per cent involve false confessions. Nearly half involve scientific fraud or junk science. More than a third involve suppression of evidence by police.

Those statistics reflect systemic problems. Eyewitness testimony is dangerously persuasive to juries, yet it remains admissible in courts almost without caveat. Some interrogation methods are more likely than others to produce false confessions, yet there are no national standards; fewer than half of states require interrogations to be videotaped, and all of them allow interrogators to lie to suspects. With the exception of DNA evidence (which emerged from biology, not criminology), forensic tests are laughably unscientific; no independent entity exists to establish that such tests are reliable before their results are admissible as evidence.

That does not automatically compromise independent investigations into crime; some remarkable and important work has been done in the tradition of the court of last resort. But it does enable individual journalists to proceed as they choose, and the choices made by Ricciardi and Demos fundamentally undermine “Making a Murderer.” Defense attorneys routinely mount biased arguments on behalf of their clients; indeed, it is their job to make the strongest one-sided case they can. But that mandate is predicated on the existence of a prosecution. We make moral allowances for the behavior of lawyers based on the knowledge that the jury will also hear a strong contrary position. No such structural protection exists in our extrajudicial courts of last resort, and Ricciardi and Demos chose not to impose their own.

Toward the end of the series, Dean Strang, Steven Avery’s defense lawyer, notes that most of the problems in the criminal-justice system stem from “unwarranted certitude”—what he calls “a tragic lack of humility of everyone who participates.” Ultimately, “Making a Murderer” shares that flaw; it does not challenge our yearning for certainty or do the difficult work of helping to foster humility. Instead, it swaps one absolute for another—and, in doing so, comes to resemble the system it seeks to correct. It is easy to express outrage, comforting to have closure, and satisfying to know all the answers. But, as defense lawyers remind people every day, it is reasonable to doubt. ♦

 

[dawaxman]

New Yorker article about Making a Murderer below. Provides a balanced opinion of the documentary series.


Dead Certainty
How “Making a Murderer” goes wrong.
BY KATHRYN SCHULZ


First came “Serial,” co-created by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, which revisited the case of Adnan Syed, convicted for the 1999 murder of his high-school classmate and former girlfriend, eighteen-year-old Hae Min Lee. That was followed by Andrew Jarecki’s “The Jinx,” a six-part HBO documentary that, uncharacteristically for the genre, sought to implicate rather than exonerate its subject, Robert Durst. A New York real-estate heir, Durst was acquitted in one murder case, is currently awaiting trial in another, and has long been suspected in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen Durst.

The latest addition to this canon is Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’s “Making a Murderer,” a ten-episode Netflix documentary that examines the 2007 conviction of a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery. Like the prisoners featured in “The Court of Last Resort,” Avery is a poor man serving time for a violent crime that he insists he didn’t commit. The questions his story raises, however, are not just about his own guilt and innocence. Nearly seventy years have passed since Erle Stanley Gardner first tried a criminal case before the jury of the general public. Yet we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project—bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers—comes to serve as our court of last resort.

If you know anything about “Making a Murderer,” you know that Steven Avery has a particularly troubling and convoluted relationship with the criminal-justice system. In July of 1985, Avery was picked up by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department after a woman named Penny Beerntsen was brutally attacked while out for a run in a Wisconsin state park. Beerntsen, who had been conscious throughout most of the attack, deliberately sought to memorize her assailant’s features, and subsequently picked Avery out of both a photo array and a live lineup. At trial six months later, Avery was found guilty and sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. He served eighteen of those before being exonerated by DNA testing, a technology not available at the time of the trial. That DNA test also identified Beerntsen’s actual assailant: a man named Gregory Allen, who was, by then, imprisoned for another assault.

“Making a Murderer” raises serious and credible allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the trials of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. It also implies that that misconduct was malicious. That could be true; vindictive prosecutions have happened in our justice system before and they will happen again. But the vast majority of misconduct by law enforcement is motivated not by spite but by the belief that the end justifies the means—that it is fine to play fast and loose with the facts if doing so will put a dangerous criminal behind bars.

That same reasoning, with the opposite aims, seems to govern “Making a Murderer.” But while people nearly always think that they are on the side of the angels, what finally matters is that they act that way. The point of being scrupulous about your means is to help insure accurate ends, whether you are trying to convict a man or exonerate him. Ricciardi and Demos instead stack the deck to support their case for Avery, and, as a result, wind up mirroring the entity that they are trying to discredit.

Partway through “Making a Murderer,” we hear a “Dateline NBC” producer discuss the death of Teresa Halbach in disturbingly chipper tones. “This is the perfect ‘Dateline’ story,” she says. “It’s a story with a twist, it grabs people’s attention. . . . Right now murder is hot, that’s what everyone wants, that’s what the competition wants, and we’re trying to beat out the other networks to get that perfect murder story.”

Like the Lee family, the Halbachs and Penny Beerntsen declined to participate in a journalistic investigation into their personal tragedies. But no one in such a situation has any real way to opt out. “Making a Murderer” takes Halbach’s death as its subject (her life is represented by a few photos and video clips, which do not rise above the standard mise en scène of murder shows), and footage of her family appears in almost every episode. Beerntsen, for her part, was dismayed to discover that the filmmakers had obtained a photograph of her battered face from the 1985 attack and used it without her knowledge. “I don’t mind looking at it, but my children should not have to relive that,” she said. “And everything we’re dealing with, the Halbachs are dealing with a thousandfold.”

This is not to suggest that reporting on violence is always morally abhorrent. Crimes themselves vary widely, as does crime coverage, and it is reasonable to hold that at some point the demands of private grief are outweighed by the public good. But neither “Serial” (which is otherwise notable for its thoroughness) nor “Making a Murderer” ever addresses the question of what rights and considerations should be extended to victims of violent crime, and under what circumstances those might justifiably be suspended. Instead, both creators and viewers tacitly dismiss the pain caused by such shows as collateral damage, unfortunate but unavoidable. Here, too, the end is taken to justify the means; someone else’s anguish comes to seem like a trifling price to pay for the greater cause a documentary claims to serve.


But what, exactly, is that cause in “Making a Murderer”? As of January 12th, more than four hundred thousand people had signed a petition to President Obama demanding that “Steven Avery should be exonerated at once by pardon.” That outrage could scarcely have been more misdirected. For one thing, it was addressed to the wrong person: Avery was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones, and the President does not have the power to pardon him. For another, it was the wrong demand. “Making a Murderer” may have presented a compelling case that Avery (and, more convincingly, Dassey) deserved a new trial, but it did not get anywhere close to establishing that either one should be exonerated.

The petition points to another weakness of “Making a Murderer”: it is far more concerned with vindicating wronged individuals than with fixing the system that wronged them. The series presents Avery’s case as a one-off—a preposterous crusade by a grudge-bearing county sheriff’s department to discredit and imprison a nemesis. (Hence the ad-hominem attacks the show has inspired.) But you don’t need to have filed a thirty-six-million-dollar suit against law enforcement to be detained, denied basic rights, and have evidence planted on your person or property. Among other things, simply being black can suffice. While Avery’s story is dramatic, every component of it is sadly common. Seventy-two per cent of wrongful convictions involve a mistaken eyewitness. Twenty-seven per cent involve false confessions. Nearly half involve scientific fraud or junk science. More than a third involve suppression of evidence by police.

That does not automatically compromise independent investigations into crime; some remarkable and important work has been done in the tradition of the court of last resort. But it does enable individual journalists to proceed as they choose, and the choices made by Ricciardi and Demos fundamentally undermine “Making a Murderer.” Defense attorneys routinely mount biased arguments on behalf of their clients; indeed, it is their job to make the strongest one-sided case they can. But that mandate is predicated on the existence of a prosecution. We make moral allowances for the behavior of lawyers based on the knowledge that the jury will also hear a strong contrary position. No such structural protection exists in our extrajudicial courts of last resort, and Ricciardi and Demos chose not to impose their own.

Toward the end of the series, Dean Strang, Steven Avery’s defense lawyer, notes that most of the problems in the criminal-justice system stem from “unwarranted certitude”—what he calls “a tragic lack of humility of everyone who participates.” Ultimately, “Making a Murderer” shares that flaw; it does not challenge our yearning for certainty or do the difficult work of helping to foster humility. Instead, it swaps one absolute for another—and, in doing so, comes to resemble the system it seeks to correct. It is easy to express outrage, comforting to have closure, and satisfying to know all the answers. But, as defense lawyers remind people every day, it is reasonable to doubt. ♦

Very interesting article, and it raised one thing for me that I hadn't even really considered before, which is the feelings of the victim (in beernsten's case) and both sets of families of the two victims (beernsten and halbach)....

I do feel sorry for Avery and dassey if they've been wrongly imprisoned but more importantly I feel sorry for the victims of crimes here who are now, unwittingly, the subject of water cooler chatter all across the western world

 

[awesome dawson]

Very interesting article, and it raised one thing for me that I hadn't even really considered before, which is the feelings of the victim (in beernsten's case) and both sets of families of the two victims (beernsten and halbach)....

I do feel sorry for Avery and dassey if they've been wrongly imprisoned but more importantly I feel sorry for the victims of crimes here who are now, unwittingly, the subject of water cooler chatter all across the western world

Thing is though, wouldn't her family want the right person/people to be convicted? It seems they ignore all the doubts about the evidence from the start and lead the witch-hunt for Avery and Dassey. Police I can understand, almost having motive to lock Avery up forever because it saves them (the State of Wisconsin) $32 million for the wrongful imprisonment before, which then gets settled for $400k but her family surely just want the right outcome which is for whoever butchered her to be convicted.

 

[dawaxman]

Thing is though, wouldn't her family want the right person/people to be convicted? It seems they ignore all the doubts about the evidence from the start and lead the witch-hunt for Avery and Dassey. Police I can understand, almost having motive to lock Avery up forever because it saves them (the State of Wisconsin) $32 million for the wrongful imprisonment before, which then gets settled for $400k but her family surely just want the right outcome which is for whoever butchered her to be convicted.

Yes, agreed. At the time, in 2005-7, I'm sure all they wanted was the culprit/s behind bars...

But now? Almost 10 years on? Surely they all want to start to move on....


As for beernsten, her case is ancient history and to dig that up again, for millions of people around the world to know about her circumstances, must be difficult, no?

 

[Rock Strongo]

Very interesting article, and it raised one thing for me that I hadn't even really considered before, which is the feelings of the victim (in beernsten's case) and both sets of families of the two victims (beernsten and halbach)....

I do feel sorry for Avery and dassey if they've been wrongly imprisoned but more importantly I feel sorry for the victims of crimes here who are now, unwittingly, the subject of water cooler chatter all across the western world

You have some experience being a family victim, if I remember correctly, but you're seriously more sorry for the victim's families than the two people who, if innocent, are spending their lives in prison and their families having to cope with that?

I'm not sure if the New Yorker watched the same series as I did. The article with a "balanced" view is just a load of tosh imo, it's more like a summary of the series.

 

[dawaxman]

You have some experience being a family victim, if I remember correctly, but you're seriously more sorry for the victim's families than the two people who, if innocent, are spending their lives in prison and their families having to cope with that?

I'm not sure if the New Yorker watched the same series as I did. The article with a "balanced" view is just a load of tosh imo, it's more like a summary of the series.

I absolutely do feel sorry for Avery and dassey IF they are innocent


My point is that barely any thought has been given to the victims families at all. That's a real shame, they've been dehumanized here

It's not one or the other...it's possible to sympathize with both Avery/dassey and the victims families, but that's not how this program has been framed at all

 

[Rock Strongo]

I absolutely do feel sorry for Avery and dassey IF they are innocent


My point is that barely any thought has been given to the victims families at all. That's a real shame, they've been dehumanized here

It's not one or the other...it's possible to sympathize with both Avery/dassey and the victims families, but that's not how this program has been framed at all

I felt the Beerntsen woman was portrayed in a fair manner, never felt she did anything wrong and she apologized to Avery who forgave her. The right guy was caught and he's in jail for his crimes. Not sure what more to expect there. And the show is Making a Murderer, not Making a Victim.

It's tougher with the Halbach family, because the brother just comes out like a, shall we say, unpleasant person. And you can't just blame that on the ones holding the cameras.

 

[dawaxman]

I felt the Beerntsen woman was portrayed in a fair manner, never felt she did anything wrong and she apologized to Avery who forgave her. The right guy was caught and he's in jail for his crimes. Not sure what more to expect there. And the show is Making a Murderer, not Making a Victim.

It's tougher with the Halbach family, because the brother just comes out like a, shall we say, unpleasant person. And you can't just blame that on the ones holding the cameras.

Not sure you're getting my point....


The two impacted families (victim-side) weren't asked to or chose not to be involved with the program. There's a chance they didn't want their cases gaining global publicity

I'm not talking about whether they came across well on the program, I'm talking about whether their thoughts/feelings were even considered in the making of the show

Sorry to go back and forth, I'm just picking up on one point from that article which states that both families declined the opportunity to actively participate in the show...and maybe it's because it a) was too sore a wound to be interviewed about, b) they wanted to put the past behind them, c) they didn't want images from the crime resurfacing for their kids to have to see or d) any other reason which they deserve the right of anonymity for


Hope that makes sense