Making a Murdered – A Prosecutor’s Perspective

We’ve been having such a robust discussion about Making a Murderer on my Facebook page, that I wanted to share my thoughts and a link to the discussion thread here.

Normally, I don’t like crime shows. The prosecutor in me gets too caught up in the inaccuracies and they drive me nuts, but the recent Netflix release, “Making A Murderer”, knocked my socks off. If I’d read it in a novel, I would have put the book down for being too implausible. I know that documentaries are often skewed and not totally impartial, but if even half of what was presented regarding the Avery and Dassey cases is accurate, what a horrific miscarriage of justice these two men have suffered.Guilty or innocent, what happened in their cases was not justice. And even if the story was skewed, the behavior of the prosecutor was completely unethical. We never commented on the particular facts of pending cases when I was in The Bronx, let alone stated them as fact to the public as if the presumption of innocence were meaningless. A good prosecutor seeks the truth and justice, not a conviction. By the third episode, I didn’t even find the show entertaining — it made me want to puke.

This said, I’m heartened by how strongly this show has made people feel, with so many coming forward to have a meaningful dialog about what is justice and how it can be achieved — and what is evidence and competency and prejudice. So often, especially in places like Facebook, people can get nasty or cast stones without much substance to opinions, but here, people really want to understand. Why did this happen? How can this happen?

What do you think? Please join the conversation either here or on my Facebook page. And for those of you who follow this blog – forgive my long absence. I’ve been working hard on my novels!!