We finished the Netflix series Making a Murderer, and I have a few thoughts on it. Oh boy, do I have a few thoughts on it. Immediately after watching the final scene of the final episode, I started formulating these thoughts into a coherent narrative in my head, because I wanted to write a blog post about it. And then, in doing some further reading, I came across this article, which basically makes the exact case I was going to make -- right down to the irony encapsulated in the final lines (the filmmakers doing the very thing they caution against, but on the other side). So now I effectively cannot write the blog post I was intending to write, because it would just end up being an inferiorly written knock-off of the linked article. Instead I will just give you a brief summary of my Making a Murderer thoughts.
It wasn’t a bad series. It tells a fascinating story, and the problems the filmmakers address with the criminal justice system -- both in general and with the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office in particular -- are very real. The way the cops get tunnel vision and go after suspects, seemingly without the slightest hint that they might be wrong, is highly disturbing. So are interrogation techniques, in which investigators feed confused and/or scared suspects the story they want to hear, and then call it a confession when the suspect inevitably parrots it back to them. (The hardest part of the series to watch is investigators coaxing a mentally slow teenager, with no council present, into admitting involvement in a very serious crime.) Confessions, along with eye-witness testimony (which the series touches on briefly, in the beginning), are still bedrocks of our legal system, even though they have been proven to be much, much, much less reliable than we think. That Making a Murderer demonstrates this in a powerful, intriguing manner is a very laudable achievement.
With that said, as illustrated in the first linked article, the series has major credibility issues. The filmmakers cherry-picked the evidence they chose to show in a way that makes the state’s case against Steven Avery and Brandon Dassey seem weaker than it really was. Further, they omit key facts from Avery’s background and the testimony of people who knew him that paint a picture of a man with strong proclivities for sexual assault and violence against women.* Because of this I find the series very dishonest and even irresponsible. It’s simply not the exploration of truth and justice that it presents itself to be. For this reason, it ultimately fails its viewers in a big way. If you haven’t watched it yet and you want to, you should. But keep all this in mind as you do.
And if you wondering, I think – I don’t know, but I think – both Avery and Dassey were involved in the crime in some manner, and I further think that some of the evidence was “massaged” by somebody (or somebodies) in the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office. In my opinion, there were enough improprieties in the defendants' prosecutions that retrials should be strongly considered. Even “bad” people deserve fair trials. And that could have been the message of Making a Murderer. Instead they went a different way – a way in which doubt was not properly emphasized and innocence was strongly implied – and in so doing, I believe they ruined what could have been an excellent product.
On a macro-level, what it ultimately boils down to is a question I keep coming back to: Why can’t everybody think like me? By this I don’t mean that I wish everybody shared all my opinions or liked all the things that I like; I mean that I wish everybody tried to look at things objectively and form opinions and make decisions based on neutral observations -- that is, based on reality rather than what one might want reality to be. We couldn't get it perfect, of course, we all have biases, but we could do a lot better than we are doing right now.
The Right clearly is the worst offenders when it comes to this. They are the side of ideology and religion, pretty much exclusively. But there are elements of it on the Left as well. I was reminded of this when I was checking out Facebook and came across a long thread about how we should boycott Girl Scout cookies. The reason? GSA has the audacity to -- get this -- believe in science. Sigh…
GMOs and organic food and things of the like are something I’ve done a complete 180 on. I used to think it made sense to shop organic and go for the “natural” brands and all that, but I’ve come to realize that it is probably pretty much all bullshit. (Although I still do buy a fair amount of organic food, because I like to support local small businesses, which are often organic, and because there are certain organic brands whose products I think taste better.) A friend of mine from high school – a Ph.D. in chemistry – frequently posts on social media about this topic, and her arguments are largely what turned me around on the subject. Also, Bill Nye changed his mind, and that dude is usually spot on.
Anyway…
In other news, it is supposed to snow here in DC on Saturday – like big-time snow, like two-feet-of-snow snow. Of course, I remember a time when I was at UMD, and a snowstorm like this was predicted, so they canceled school the night before the storm was supposed to hit, and then not a single flake fell. The truth is, we aren’t very good at predicting the weather. Actually, that’s probably a mischaracterization. The real truth is likely that future weather is a random event of which there is no certain outcome, and so the best we can do is assign probabilities to possible outcomes -- and the thing about possible outcomes is that they aren't definite. (I remember hearing once in an academic talk that meteorologists actually do a pretty good job of estimating these probabilities – like roughly half the time they say there is a 50% chance of rain, it rains.)
I think this fact (that future weather is a random event) is part of the reason why people think meteorologists are more wrong than they are. If somebody sees an 80% chance of rain, and then it doesn’t rain, they think the forecast was wrong. But that’s not necessarily true, because the forecast allowed for a 20% chance of not raining – and any particular day of no rain could be part of that 20%. The way a forecast is wrong is if its percentages don’t match up with reality over a large sample -- like if a meteorologist said there was an 80% chance of rain 100 times and out of those it only rained 30 times, then one could safely conclude the forecasting model is wrong. (And by the way, this isn’t restricted to weather, people don’t understand randomness and statistics in many fields. As a sports fan, this frequently drives me crazy.)
But back to this weekend. I’m definitely not looking forward to such a snowstorm if it actually materializes. Snow is fine if you don’t have anywhere to go and you don’t have young children. But with a hyperactive three-year-old and a little baby to boot, heavy snowfall is going to be dreadful. What are we going to do? There are only so many snowmen you can build before you get cold and run out of dry clothes. And Lil’ S1 already watches too much iPad. And he already gets on our nerves if he’s inside for more than three minutes. How are we going to survive three days? It’s not even fun to drink (a snow day staple in the good ol’ days) because you know you are going to have to wake up at the crack of dawn to the sound of somebody crying in your ear (usually one of my kids… occasionally my wife). Ugh... Kids... they kinda ruin everything, huh?
Anyway, that’s about all I have time for today.
Until next time…
*To me, the most egregious omission of evidence is the fact that Dassey told the police that he helped Avery remove the battery from the victim’s car, and then they found Avery’s DNA under the hood. So much was made of blood samples linking Avery to the car – were they planted? – I felt totally cheated finding out later that even without the blood they could place him at the car. The filmmakers responded to this (and other questions), but not in a very thorough or convincing manner. They Tweeted that they omitted it because it was "disputed evidence" and "less significant." But (a) pretty much all evidence in a criminal trial is disputed -- it's the defense's job to dispute it; (b) it's highly significant because it ties Avery to the car and it corroborates something Dassey told investigators, which they also omitted.
Also, the series really should have gone further into Avery's past. Even if they didn't know about the stuff with his ex-fiancée there was plenty of stuff out there (I mean, it's never even explained WHY everybody in the area hates him so much). Apparently Brendan alleged that Avery touched him inappropriately, and there were accusations that Avery molestated other family members. The series doesn't mention this at all. (By the way, the entire Avery family sounds like a bunch of sick fucks. Makes me wonder what was going on in their childhood, and it also makes me wonder if the sympathy I felt for Avery's parents while watching the movie was well-founded or not -- in most cases you reap what you sow.) And when they mention anything sordid about his past, they do so very briefly. At one point in one of the early episodes, they quickly flash a letter on the screen he wrote to his ex-wife, in which he threatens to kill her, and then don’t say anything else about it. And I remember being confused, and thinking, “Wait, did he just write to his wife that he’s going to kill her?”
It wasn’t a bad series. It tells a fascinating story, and the problems the filmmakers address with the criminal justice system -- both in general and with the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office in particular -- are very real. The way the cops get tunnel vision and go after suspects, seemingly without the slightest hint that they might be wrong, is highly disturbing. So are interrogation techniques, in which investigators feed confused and/or scared suspects the story they want to hear, and then call it a confession when the suspect inevitably parrots it back to them. (The hardest part of the series to watch is investigators coaxing a mentally slow teenager, with no council present, into admitting involvement in a very serious crime.) Confessions, along with eye-witness testimony (which the series touches on briefly, in the beginning), are still bedrocks of our legal system, even though they have been proven to be much, much, much less reliable than we think. That Making a Murderer demonstrates this in a powerful, intriguing manner is a very laudable achievement.
With that said, as illustrated in the first linked article, the series has major credibility issues. The filmmakers cherry-picked the evidence they chose to show in a way that makes the state’s case against Steven Avery and Brandon Dassey seem weaker than it really was. Further, they omit key facts from Avery’s background and the testimony of people who knew him that paint a picture of a man with strong proclivities for sexual assault and violence against women.* Because of this I find the series very dishonest and even irresponsible. It’s simply not the exploration of truth and justice that it presents itself to be. For this reason, it ultimately fails its viewers in a big way. If you haven’t watched it yet and you want to, you should. But keep all this in mind as you do.
And if you wondering, I think – I don’t know, but I think – both Avery and Dassey were involved in the crime in some manner, and I further think that some of the evidence was “massaged” by somebody (or somebodies) in the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Office. In my opinion, there were enough improprieties in the defendants' prosecutions that retrials should be strongly considered. Even “bad” people deserve fair trials. And that could have been the message of Making a Murderer. Instead they went a different way – a way in which doubt was not properly emphasized and innocence was strongly implied – and in so doing, I believe they ruined what could have been an excellent product.
On a macro-level, what it ultimately boils down to is a question I keep coming back to: Why can’t everybody think like me? By this I don’t mean that I wish everybody shared all my opinions or liked all the things that I like; I mean that I wish everybody tried to look at things objectively and form opinions and make decisions based on neutral observations -- that is, based on reality rather than what one might want reality to be. We couldn't get it perfect, of course, we all have biases, but we could do a lot better than we are doing right now.
The Right clearly is the worst offenders when it comes to this. They are the side of ideology and religion, pretty much exclusively. But there are elements of it on the Left as well. I was reminded of this when I was checking out Facebook and came across a long thread about how we should boycott Girl Scout cookies. The reason? GSA has the audacity to -- get this -- believe in science. Sigh…
GMOs and organic food and things of the like are something I’ve done a complete 180 on. I used to think it made sense to shop organic and go for the “natural” brands and all that, but I’ve come to realize that it is probably pretty much all bullshit. (Although I still do buy a fair amount of organic food, because I like to support local small businesses, which are often organic, and because there are certain organic brands whose products I think taste better.) A friend of mine from high school – a Ph.D. in chemistry – frequently posts on social media about this topic, and her arguments are largely what turned me around on the subject. Also, Bill Nye changed his mind, and that dude is usually spot on.
[My name is Jonas, DC's in the red... Thanks for all you've shown us, your weekend is dead...]
Anyway…
In other news, it is supposed to snow here in DC on Saturday – like big-time snow, like two-feet-of-snow snow. Of course, I remember a time when I was at UMD, and a snowstorm like this was predicted, so they canceled school the night before the storm was supposed to hit, and then not a single flake fell. The truth is, we aren’t very good at predicting the weather. Actually, that’s probably a mischaracterization. The real truth is likely that future weather is a random event of which there is no certain outcome, and so the best we can do is assign probabilities to possible outcomes -- and the thing about possible outcomes is that they aren't definite. (I remember hearing once in an academic talk that meteorologists actually do a pretty good job of estimating these probabilities – like roughly half the time they say there is a 50% chance of rain, it rains.)
I think this fact (that future weather is a random event) is part of the reason why people think meteorologists are more wrong than they are. If somebody sees an 80% chance of rain, and then it doesn’t rain, they think the forecast was wrong. But that’s not necessarily true, because the forecast allowed for a 20% chance of not raining – and any particular day of no rain could be part of that 20%. The way a forecast is wrong is if its percentages don’t match up with reality over a large sample -- like if a meteorologist said there was an 80% chance of rain 100 times and out of those it only rained 30 times, then one could safely conclude the forecasting model is wrong. (And by the way, this isn’t restricted to weather, people don’t understand randomness and statistics in many fields. As a sports fan, this frequently drives me crazy.)
But back to this weekend. I’m definitely not looking forward to such a snowstorm if it actually materializes. Snow is fine if you don’t have anywhere to go and you don’t have young children. But with a hyperactive three-year-old and a little baby to boot, heavy snowfall is going to be dreadful. What are we going to do? There are only so many snowmen you can build before you get cold and run out of dry clothes. And Lil’ S1 already watches too much iPad. And he already gets on our nerves if he’s inside for more than three minutes. How are we going to survive three days? It’s not even fun to drink (a snow day staple in the good ol’ days) because you know you are going to have to wake up at the crack of dawn to the sound of somebody crying in your ear (usually one of my kids… occasionally my wife). Ugh... Kids... they kinda ruin everything, huh?
Anyway, that’s about all I have time for today.
Until next time…
*To me, the most egregious omission of evidence is the fact that Dassey told the police that he helped Avery remove the battery from the victim’s car, and then they found Avery’s DNA under the hood. So much was made of blood samples linking Avery to the car – were they planted? – I felt totally cheated finding out later that even without the blood they could place him at the car. The filmmakers responded to this (and other questions), but not in a very thorough or convincing manner. They Tweeted that they omitted it because it was "disputed evidence" and "less significant." But (a) pretty much all evidence in a criminal trial is disputed -- it's the defense's job to dispute it; (b) it's highly significant because it ties Avery to the car and it corroborates something Dassey told investigators, which they also omitted.
Also, the series really should have gone further into Avery's past. Even if they didn't know about the stuff with his ex-fiancée there was plenty of stuff out there (I mean, it's never even explained WHY everybody in the area hates him so much). Apparently Brendan alleged that Avery touched him inappropriately, and there were accusations that Avery molestated other family members. The series doesn't mention this at all. (By the way, the entire Avery family sounds like a bunch of sick fucks. Makes me wonder what was going on in their childhood, and it also makes me wonder if the sympathy I felt for Avery's parents while watching the movie was well-founded or not -- in most cases you reap what you sow.) And when they mention anything sordid about his past, they do so very briefly. At one point in one of the early episodes, they quickly flash a letter on the screen he wrote to his ex-wife, in which he threatens to kill her, and then don’t say anything else about it. And I remember being confused, and thinking, “Wait, did he just write to his wife that he’s going to kill her?”
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