MAKING A MURDERER Creators Contacted By Juror Who Reveals Interesting New Information
I want to echo nearly everything Mick said earlier this morning about Netflix's wildly addicting new documentary series Making a Murderer. My wife and I binge-watched the whole show this past weekend, and it's an infuriating look at America's court system (to say the least). I don't want to say much more without a spoiler warning because I think you all should watch it, but it's definitely one of those things where after you see it, you're going to want to dive in and find out as much as you can about the latest updates of the case(s).
Spoilers ahead if you don't know what happened with the real-life outcome of the trials depicted in the show.
Filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos were on The Today Show this morning, and they dropped a fascinating new bit of information:
A juror admitting to voting to convict Steven Avery of murder because they "feared for their personal safety" seems like kind of a big deal to me, but I'm not a lawyer and don't know anything about what potential ramifications (if any) this could have on Avery's future. (Sadly, probably none.)
A quick note: a lot of people who have signed the petitions going around to free Avery and Brendan Dassey are doing so based solely on what they saw in the documentary, and while I think Making a Murderer is an extraordinary accomplishment from a storytelling perspective, there's no way to remove the filmmakers' bias from the proceedings. Every single edit contains bias; they're choosing when and how to share information with us. I'm not saying Avery is guilty (I honestly don't know who killed Teresa Halbach), but I do think that the series shows how time and time again, Avery's defense countered nearly every point made by the prosecution and provided vast quantities of reasonable doubt, only for the system to fail him in the end.
And on a separate note, I will say that from a pacing perspective, I think the show would have tremendously benefitted from being cut down to eight episodes instead of ten. The last two episodes dragged a little for me, and I think there are probably enough places throughout the season that could have been trimmed by a couple of minutes to bring it down to eight episodes (which is reportedly the number of episodes the filmmakers originally pitched to Netflix). Still, it's one of the most compulsively watchable things I've seen since The Jinx, and hopefully Ricciardi and Demos' efforts will, at the very least, result in people thinking more about how our current system operates and possibly being inspired to try to enact some meaningful changes to it.