Over a couple of nights, I recently binge-streamed Netflix's "Making a Murderer". Here is my review.
I will stipulate that I know that you didn't ask my opinion, if you will stipulate that nobody is making you read this.
Anyway... here are my takeaways.
1. It was a good documentary. I watch many documentaries. It was a good one. It wasn't a great one. I found it watchable and interesting. I absolutely did NOT find it "riveting". It was a little boring at times. Mostly good. Not perfect.
"The Jinx: The Life And Deaths of Robert Durst" was much better, IMHO.
Semi-spoilers to follow...
2. Don't trust the documentarians. In this case, they clearly have a biased point of view, and they did not give you all of the evidence. Sometimes a documentary can be considered "good" if it convinces you of things that are not true. Convincing ≠ True.
3. Don't trust the lawyers. (This is generally good advice in any aspect of your life.)
I have friends who are lawyers, and some of them are, at their heart, very good people, but at the end of the day, their job is to misrepresent facts, hold back information, redirect attention away from the obvious, and confuse rational thought. That is what they are paid to do, and they get paid handsomely for it.
Even a completely mediocre lawyer could convict the clearly guilty or exonerate the innocent. It takes a particularly skilled one to convict the innocent or exonerate the guilty. Most lawyers have it as their goal to be "particularly skilled". As a result, they do not serve the truth.
And look, I understand the way the system works. I can understand the rationale that such agents are necessary in the courts of a free society. I don't need the lesson about the "greater good". That is irrelevant. I am just saying never take anything a lawyer tells you at face value. It might be true. It might not. But the information is coming from a professional liar. If Avery's lawyers think he is guilty or not is irrelevant to what they say on camera or in the courtroom. They simply say whatever it takes to make you think what they are being paid to make you think. They probably know he is guilty. (They even have to lie about that... even to themselves.) We know they probably know Avery is guilty. We just pretend to believe that they aren't pretending to believe that he is innocent.
4. Don't believe the law enforcement agencies in this case. Most police are good people. They make up a very thin blue line who daily put themselves in physical danger to protect the innocent. But there ARE crooked cops. There ARE arrogant cops. There ARE thuggish cops. There ARE cops who will plant evidence. It is rare, but it has happened.
There are enough twists and turns in the Avery case to assume that the Manitowoc's Sheriff's department is careless and partially incompetent at best... and I can't assume that none of them are crooked.
That having been said...
WHAT IF I TOLD YOU...
5. A crooked cop could actually work to "frame" the guilty party. It is actually more common for the rare incompetent or crooked cop to want to "pad the evidence" against the guilty than it is to get an innocent man convicted.
Having a crooked or incompetent police department... and slippery lawyers on both sides... being filmed by biased documentary makers... does NOT mean that the suspected perp was innocent. and from the beginning to the end of "Making a Murderer", absolutely nothing was shown that makes me doubt, in the least, that Avery was guilty. I am not as sure as to the degree of his nephew's involvement, but I believe he knew it went down.
The question of whether he should have been convicted is one discussion, but whether or not he is guilty is a DIFFERENT discussion... and the hoops that I, personally, would have to jump through to come to a logical belief that Avery is innocent are too much for me. I would only embarrass myself by trying.
So, my conclusion is that "Making a Murderer" is an interesting documentary and definitely worth the watch as long as you understand that everyone from the filmmakers on down are misrepresenting things.
It is perfectly natural for us to want a simple good guy in the white hat to pit against the bad guy in the black hat. But in life, often there are nothing but black hats all across the board.
I personally think that the only innocent people in the documentary were Teresa Halbach and her family members.
Yet I fully expect a certain predictable segment of society who is just gagging for a cause to go slap "Free Steven Avery!" bumper stickers on their cars. I think such people are often like the lawyers, only without the benefit to society. Many people do not care about truth. They care about their image as a "supercool supersmart person who cares about injustice and sees through the BS."
The problem is that they obviously are incapable of seeing through a documentary's BS.
And "Making a Murderer" is a master class in the art of bullshittery, IMHO.
