Brock Beauchamp

I've been going 'round with my wife for two days over this documentary, which has helped coalesce my thoughts into something more coherent. So here we go: - There are important lessons to be learned and they're mostly about Brendan Dassey, not Steven Avery (after 2003, anyway). Steven Avery was a falsely convicted man with several hundred thousand dollars on his side. He hired not only one of the best lawyers in WI, but two of the best lawyers in the state. If anyone had goodwill and power to topple the corrupt system, it's Steven Avery. Dassey, on the other hand, didn't stand a chance from day one. He was a minor. He's mentally-impaired. He had no money. His counsel didn't give a **** about him. He was, in essence, Steven Avery in 1985 all over again. The police railroaded him just as they did to Steven in 1985 and just as they do to countless other people in this country on a yearly basis. - If righteous justice is on your side, you shouldn't need to omit details to the point of deception. If your cause is true, the facts will support your cause. The documentary throws many emotionally charged moments at the audience, only to never come back to those points again (radioing in the license plate three days prior, the missing voicemails, etc). It straight-up omits some of the most damning evidence against Avery entirely. It's devious and manipulative. All I ask is for a presentation of the facts. You can also give me your opinion but if I feel you're trying to trick me... - Lying and deception bring everything into question. What else am I missing here? What else have the documentarians slipped under cup #3 while I wasn't looking? How else are they deceiving me? As I said, there are many important lessons to be learned from Making a Murderer but if the documentarians manipulate the facts of the case to the point where I question their motives, they've lost the argument. I begin to view everything I see with skepticism of its veracity, not outrage. The documentarians have ceased to be a reliable source of information in my eyes. And maybe most importantly, the people who need to see this documentary the most - the people who consistently side with law enforcement and vehemently swear "this stuff doesn't happen" - are handed a big fat "get out of jail free" card. They have multiple "gotcha" moments that allow them to disregard everything in the documentary. Instead of being forced to acknowledge some ugly truths about our legal system, they can play "hide the ball" and shift the argument because the documentarians were playing their own game of "hide the ball". So, at the end of the day, we're left in an echo chamber and circled around to exactly where we began. Those people who want to believe the documentary believe it. Those people who want to disregard the documentary are given ample opportunity to point out how the documentary can't be trusted and should therefore be ignored. And that's really disappointing because the documentary presents important lessons that shouldn't be ignored.

Well played, sir.

A wonderfully written article on the documentary and why we shouldn't fall into its traps. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/01/25/dead-certainty "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."

For all intents and purposes, they were free and clear. They were being deposed for a civil suit against the department. The police and prosecution had already been cleared by internal investigation. The officers, even Lenk, had no real skin in the game at that point. Worst case scenario, the county is forced to hand a bunch of money to Steve Avery. There's little to no motive for officers to completely fabricate a crime just to make sure somebody else higher up the chain keeps their fat wallet (in this case, the government itself).

IMO, the garage and bedroom are the most damning evidence that something with the investigation smells bad. Those two pieces make no sense, at least the way the documentary presented it. The bedroom? Maybe. Swap out the mattress, burn it in the fire, toss the burnt metal somewhere in the 40 acres of junk. The garage? No fuggin' way he cleaned that big ol' mess.

I hated them both. Having read the comic, I know I'm supposed to hate the character but I didn't hate what he was supposed to be as a story element, I hated his representation in the show. Some of that is scripting, some of that is on the actor.

I wouldn't rule out that they manipulated evidence but I believe they'd do such a thing because they believed Avery to be guilty, not because they were trying to prevent his civil case from going to trial. And I agree they don't seem very bright but being a bit dim reinforces the idea they're incapable of orchestrating a masterful frame job, not confirmation they did it. Getting a half dozen people on board with a huge cover-up is hard to pull off. Being bad at your job and doing stupid **** you shouldn't be doing is easy. Hell, given the way the sheriff's department acted, it's almost expected. And the "we're not supposed to be a part of the investigation" bit is more convoluted than it seems at first sight. It's likely the department "in charge" of the investigation simply didn't have the manpower and needed Manitowoc to supply warm bodies. The investigation covered 40+ acres of land full of old junked-up crap. A handful of people from a neighboring department can't staff an investigation of that magnitude. Does that mean what Manitowoc did is okay? No, it doesn't. They shouldn't have been on-site... But, again, it's likely many of these foul-ups are due to incompetence, not malevolence.

Sorry, I don't buy it. You're equating department liability with personal liability. While the department was certainly liable for wrong-doing, the police officers themselves were free and clear of punishment. So why would they risk actual life and liberty when it was obvious a ****storm of monumental proportions was coming their way? That's the time people remove themselves from the situation and run for the hills, they don't double-down and involve themselves when they've already been absolved of previous "crimes". If your CEO kills someone in the office, do you go through elaborate lengths to implicate yourself in the crime by helping him/her out or do you run like hell in the other direction? I'm not saying the Manitowoc sheriffs are fine, upstanding citizens but man, suggesting they framed an innocent man out of malice seems really far-fetched. At the end of the day, most people look out for themselves first and foremost and none of the people being deposed had any real skin in the game. The people who were being hung out to dry left the department years before and it would have been easy to build a set of "fall guys" out of the people no longer actively involved with the department.

One thing to remember is that statistics revolving around the accuracy/inaccuracy of confessions, eyewitnesses, etc. cannot be presented to the jury in a court of law due to complex legal mumbo-jumbo that was mostly lost on me when it was explained (but I was assured there is a legitimate reason for this policy to exist). So while it's interesting to speculate on the accuracy of the confession, the jury is not able to view Dassey's testimony through the same lens. Lawyers must argue the veracity of the confession using only the confession itself.

Absolutely. My wife quoted me exact numbers but I can't recall them offhand. Confessions are more reliable than eyewitness testimony (which is crazy inaccurate, so much that it's more often inaccurate than it is accurate) but they're still relatively unreliable. As I've mentioned earlier, everything about the Dassey case seems nonsensical. Using the information presented to us, the physical evidence doesn't match up with his testimony even a little bit. Add in the fact counsel was not present and... *head explodes* The police questioning a minor about a murder without counsel present was possibly my wife's biggest "WAIT, WHAT" moment of the documentary.

Yes, all of this. The idea that Avery may be guilty and the police/prosecution are also shady are not at opposite sides of the spectrum. Both are possible, maybe even likely.

I can't speak for anyone else but I suspected Avery was guilty from early on in the documentary. Would I have convicted him? I have no idea because the documentary's presentation of the case is incomplete. Would I have let him walk? I have no idea for the same reason. My point isn't that Avery is guilty or innocent, my point is that it's reckless to state with any kind of certainty we know what happened based on a documentary that obviously pushed an agenda on its audience. By my estimation, the trial was approximately 200 hours of in-court time (six hours a day, five days a week, seven weeks long). The documentary spent less than three hours showing us only one side of the Avery case. To be completely frank, I'm disappointed that so many buy into the documentary without questioning its own motives. By the third or fourth episode, it was obvious to me the documentary was telling me only what it wanted me to see and hear and wasn't making even a nominal attempt to frame the situation in a balanced manner. Still, the documentary does a good job of highlighting some of the issue of our justice system, which is what I prefer to focus on because those mis-steps are plain to see.

Yep.

The guy probably didn't feel like writing a 10,000 word manifesto about the case when it's no longer his job to cover such things.

I don't think anyone is ignoring anything, we're just viewing the documentary's narrative with suspicion. The cops may have framed Avery but man, that's a pretty far-fetched thing to believe, especially in regards to the car, the key, the bones, and everything else surrounding Avery and the girl. What do the cops gain by this? Locking away a guy who is suing them? Why would they care that much? Anyone with a brain would realize the ****storm that would arise from a high profile case of this kind and the scrutiny it would bring to the department. Someone would have to be certifiably insane to even attempt a frame job. I don't like the police in Manitowoc. I think some of them come across as pretty sleazy and possibly corrupt. But it's a long way from "sleazy" to "framing a guy who was falsely convicted of another crime because you don't like him." It's possible, but... Occam's Razor applies here. There's so much downside for the police and so little upside I struggle to believe anyone would be that reckless with their career, freedom, and life. I'll buy into intellectual laziness and institutional incompetence as real things displayed in the documentary but you're going to have a hell of a time convincing me the cops set up Avery from the get-go. It doesn't pass the smell test.

I wish this article went into a bit more detail but it's interesting none-the-less. A journalist covering the case from the early days forward gives a very different view of the case (and it aligns with my thoughts the documentary left out loads of evidence that didn't fit the narrative). http://www.startribune.com/making-a-murderer-is-riveting-but-not-the-whole-story/365495011/

I've started real work on the complete redesign, BTW. My target is Opening Day or thereabouts. It'll be a difficult timeline but manageable. At the very latest, expect to see it by early May.

The entire Dassey situation is sketchy and I've never said otherwise. Was he involved? Possibly. Was he mishandled by the police and his own counsel? Absolutely. Only being presented the events seen in the documentary - and, again, there are weeks of trial not presented to the audience and I highly doubt the prosecution sat in their chairs and did nothing during that time - the evidence points to Avery. Are there gaps in the evidence presented? Absolutely... But we only see a snippet of the entire picture. And it's unreasonable to make an assertion while peering through a keyhole. That's why I believe the lesson of the documentary is systemic misconduct by many of the involved parties, not whether Steven Avery actually murdered the girl. We can't tell if he murdered her because we weren't there and there are enormous gaps in our coverage... But we can see some pretty obvious misconduct during several steps of the process.

I agree that from the perspective *we've seen*, a conviction looks ridiculous but, again, Avery's case was 6-7 weeks long. We don't even know if the prosecution had arguments or even physical evidence that negate some or all of your above points because we didn't get to see the prosecution's case. It just seems ridiculous to me. This documentary obviously had an agenda. Taking it as holy gospel when there were literally hundreds of courtroom hours not depicted in the series is ludicrous. That doesn't mean the conviction is right. It also doesn't mean it's wrong. It means we, as an audience, are spouting judgment from a perspective of ignorance and should temper our outrage a bit and we certainly shouldn't be making a ruling from the couch.

I thought they had the Iron Fist stuff sorted but I haven't been paying much attention over the past month or so.

You can't honestly believe Mauer - a guy who played catcher for ten seasons - didn't play hurt. Every catcher plays hurt or they wouldn't play after the first few weeks of ST.

As much as I loved JJ, I would have preferred to see Netflix show a little restraint and move JJ over to The Defenders series. It was a great season. It's okay to let it be a great season and move on to a larger project with the character, opening up room for another character to shine in their own series.

The prosecution's timeline we saw was nonsensical. The prosecution's case was also roughly three weeks long and we saw nothing of it. Doesn't that make you somewhat uncomfortable? I'm not even convinced Making a Murderer should be considered a documentary. It set out with the goal of displaying Steve Avery's innocence and intentionally withholds information from the audience to illustrate that point. Still, a lot of valuable lessons can be learned from the "documentary".

Unfortunately, I believe this to be the case. Not necessarily that the left should be emboldened, only that this country continues to drift away from the populous middle. Little long-term good will come from this shift. The presidency should wiggle between slight left and slight right, not swing wildly between two polarizing viewpoints. The president's most important job is keeping the morons in Congress in check and it's hard to do that if everyone has radicalized to one side or the other.

Tony O is a comparison but it's not a particularly good comparison. Oliva played right field. That's hardly a demanding position. Mauer played the most demanding position and played it well. Oliva had three batting titles. How many RF/DH have batting titles? Dozens? Mauer also has three batting titles. No other American League catcher has a batting title in 115 years of play. The last NL catcher to win the title did it before the end of WWII. Will Mauer make the HoF? I don't know. Should Mauer make the HoF? Yeah, probably. He wasn't only elite at the position for a decade... In that decade, he was one of the top two or three catchers of all time. That's strong consideration - if not outright election material - for the Hall.