Did You Miss the Point of Making a Murderer?
If you finished Making a Murderer (likely on an uncharacteristic binge, even for the most weathered Netflix viewer) and thought, “I can’t believe this. He’s innocent. How could this happen?” you missed the point of the docuseries.
But if when the black credits screen with the grungy acoustic song scrolled and you thought, “He got we he had coming to him,” you missed the point too.
Making a Murderer isn’t about Steven Avery or Brendan Dassey. It isn’t about Teresa Halbach. It isn’t about the potential corruption of the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department and the state of Wisconsin.
It’s about you and me.
It’s about how at some point, we left behind presumption of innocence – a foundational principle of civil criminal justice systems and societies centuries old. Or maybe we’ve never presumed it at all. This was one of the themes of the show, but it was kind of a buried lede. It was clouded by the conspiracy theme for entertainment purposes.
Did you pick up on how unbelievably one-sided the show was in favor of Avery? Leveraging highly-selective information and human nature for the love of conspiracy, creators/directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos crafted a very emotionally-gripping argument that Avery and Dassey were framed for Halbach’s murder in a twisted revenge plot by local law enforcement.
In what common sense would tell us was a rather complicated murder trial, the show had rather obvious, but not typical, good guys and bad guys.
Avery, who spent 18 years in prison for a brutal sexual assault he didn’t commit, was portrayed as a happy, gracious and simple guy who worked at his family salvage yard. His defense attorneys were highly-likable gentlemen who were outspoken about failings in the American criminal justice system. The learning-disabled Dassey was presented as just a kid who was blatantly manipulated as he was coaxed to divulge a false confession about his involvement in Halbech’s murder.
Conversely, the state prosecution were even described at one point as “evil incarnate” (although that was from an appointed lawyer who would find himself seemingly aligned with said evil). Police officers and successful DAs could only be described as biased, corrupt, scheming colluders based on what the show presented.
Columbia film school alums Ricciardi and Demos, the prior of which is a New York Law School graduate, produced Making a Murderer over the course of 10 years. A daunting amount of work must’ve gone into the research and interviews. Every piece of information and evidence was probably reread, rewatched, relistened to again and again.
Maybe I’m naive, but I just haven’t been able to buy that two with their credentials would go to this much effort just to produce a highly-vindictive documentary, throwing out any journalistic responsibility. Not that they’re journalist’s, they’re filmmakers. But they left out information vital for an understanding of the trial and verdicts. Saying all that, though, I also don’t think the venture was wasted on a mere piece of crime drama for Netflix’s sake.
I choose to view this documentary, not as flagrantly-biased coverage of true crime, but an alternate reality, where a public murder case is overwhelmingly covered with the accused’s presumption of innocence.
Once you view it through that prism, it kind of changes things. For example, it’s how you justify mentioning the prosecuting DA Ken Kratz’ sexting scandal, which had absolutely nothing to do with the case, while leaving out that Avery and Halbach knew each other prior to the murder, and that Halbach was creeped out by him. It’s also how you make Halbach’s brother Mike look like a a villain, or even a co-conspirator. Because, since we assume Avery is innocent, the brother who wants him convicted for his sister’s murder has to be out for him, right?
When you put it that way, it still might seem odd, but I’ll pose this: When you watch the local news and see a 25-second clip covering a court case, and you see a man or woman standing in some sort of baggy jail/prison uniform in front of a judge, and you see his or her creepy mugshot that they’re not allowed to smile in plastered on the screen, does it ever occur to you that the person is innocent?
When I reflected on that, I had to admit that it does not. Not in an active, malicious or racist/classist way, but it’s just more guilt by association. I generally don’t associate courtrooms with innocent people. And generally speaking, in the US, a strong majority of criminal cases brought are convicted, and I’m going to say most are correct verdicts. So, in the same way I assume people in church are Christians, I assume people entangled in the legal system are criminals.
So I’m ready to assume guilt with such a small percentage of the information when I watch this brief news coverage. It’s the same way that people without law degrees watched a 10-hour docuseries involving maybe two of over 200 hours of a trial and thought they had overwhelming evidence to cast a verdict. And restricting reality within the frame, the only reasonable verdict is not guilty. Both are pretty absurd, but Making a Murderer shed light on the rarely-pondered other side of that dynamic.
The trap is to blame this bias on the media or the legal system. That’s the easy way out. These faceless notions and large, cold, intricate systems. But both the media and legal system are made up of people. Maybe we the people have abandoned rights of the accused. Maybe we the people never really bought into it. Maybe the assumption of guilt is just too strong for the presumption of innocence. Maybe the discipline required to practice it goes against human nature.
It’s about you and me.
