Making a Murderer runs for about 10 hours on Netflix and is, in many ways, a fascinating story about small-town America. I strongly recommend that if you watch it you also read Kathryn Schulz's piece in the Jan. 25 New Yorker, "Dead Certainty: How 'Making a Murderer' Goes Wrong." The two most important points that Schulz makes are that such a private investigative project answers to no one and that true-crime documentaries "turn people's private tragedies into public entertainment," hence the unwillingness of some who are involved to participate.
The main problem with a true-crime film -- even one ten hours long -- is in the selection of what you show and what you don't, what you tell the audience and what you withhold. A director can easily manipulate the sympathies of an audience by even such simple methods as showing the prosecutor quickly combing his hair before the judge starts the day. I have served on two criminal juries and I was surprised that Making a Murderer did not talk to any of the jury members after the two trials. It might have been useful for us to know what happened in the deliberations; if there was some reason they could not talk to the jury members or tell us anything about who was on the jury and how they were selected the directors did not inform us what that reason might be.
Making a Murderer takes place in Manitowoc County Wisconsin, where Steve Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey are on trial, separately, for the murder of Teresa Halbach. These trials take place only a few years after Avery has been freed from eighteen years in jail for a crime of which he is now, thanks to DNA, exonerated. Avery's lawyers try to claim that the evidence against him was planted by the sheriff's department because the sheriffs are being sued by Avery, but the defense case for a frame is as circumstantial as the prosecution's case against Avery. And sixteen-year-old Brendan Dassey is convicted almost exclusively on the basis of a confession -- one he claims was coerced when his mother and lawyer were not present. Dassey claims he made up the confession based on a book he read, possibly Kiss the Girls by James Patterson, though Dassey does not remember the author and the defense does not seem to take this any more seriously than the prosecution, perhaps because no one believes that the mentally impaired Dassey could read a book. This is one of many loose ends left dangling by the filmmakers.
Class conflict is not mentioned by Demos and Ricciardi but it is a strong element of their film. I grew up in a small town in New York state's Columbia county, not so different from Manitowoc, where it was largely due to happenstance who became a criminal and who went into law enforcement, where the lower class looked down on the even-lower class, those like the Avery family who ran a junkyard and lived in trailers. The prosecutor in the Dassey and Avery cases was later forced to resign for repeated sexual harassment, Avery's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to claim that he was framed -- rather than emphasizing possible reasonable doubt, Dassey's lawyers were either incompetent or trying, perhaps inadvertently, to help the prosecution.
It is unclear whether the filmmakers think that there is something wrong with our criminal justice system or whether they think it is the individuals who are operating it that are the problem. It is probably both, to some extent, though it is by no means clear how things can be fixed or improved so that we can be sure justice is achieved for everyone, regardless of race, class or IQ. Even a documentary film this long leaves much out. When one watches a documentary by Frederic Wiseman, for instance, there are no lives at stake and he is free to add or subtract whatever he thinks is appropriate to enhance his point of view. Making a Murderer is a riveting documentary but generally I prefer true-crime books that examine all sides in considerable detail: Jack Olsen's Doc, Peter Meyer's The Yale Murder, Joe McGinnis's Fatal Vision.
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