Since Netflix released the documentary “Making a Murderer” in mid-December, its imprisoned central character has received a wave of support, including more than 275,000 signatures on a
petition asking President Obama to pardon him.
The 10-part series, by the filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, depicts a true-crime saga that seethes with troubling questions over whether Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man convicted of the 2005 murder of a young woman, was framed by law enforcement officials.
But the prosecutor in the case, Ken Kratz, said viewers
convinced of Mr. Avery’s innocence did not get to see important evidence that led a jury to convict him.
The series “really presents misinformation,” Mr. Kratz said in an interview on Monday.
He portrayed the program as a tool of Mr. Avery’s defense and accused the filmmakers of intentionally withholding facts that would lead viewers to see his guilt.
Ms. Ricciardi, Ms. Demos and one of Mr. Avery’s lawyers, Dean Strang, disputed Mr. Kratz’s remarks in interviews on Monday, arguing that the documentary couldn’t have included every facet of the case.
“Our opinion is that we included the state’s most compelling evidence,” Ms. Ricciardi said.
Mr. Strang echoed that view. “No one’s going to watch a 600-hour movie of gavel-to-gavel, unedited coverage of a trial,” he said.
“Making a Murderer” has given rise to an army of armchair detectives since its release the week before Christmas. Ten years in the making, the film tracks the legal troubles of Mr. Avery, the part owner of an auto salvage yard who, in 2003, was freed after 18 years in prison when DNA evidence cleared him in a 1985 sexual assault.
He later sued Manitowoc County, Wis., officials for $36 million. Then in 2005, shortly after several county officials were deposed over their handling of evidence in the case, Mr. Avery was accused once again. This time, he was charged with the murder of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old photographer who had visited his property to take pictures of a vehicle for Auto Trader magazine.
In 2007, Mr. Avery was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. The same year, his 16-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, was convicted of participating in the murder as well as the sexual assault of Ms. Halbach. He is serving life with the possibility of early release in 2048.
A second petition at Whitehouse.gov with more than 70,000 signatures calls on Mr. Obama to pardon Mr. Dassey along with Mr. Avery. (The president only has the power to grant pardons for crimes prosecuted under federal, not state, law.)
The documentary impugns the criminal justice system’s pursuit of Mr. Avery and Mr. Dassey at nearly every turn, pointing the finger at investigators, prosecutors and a defense lawyer who was assigned to Mr. Dassey.
The most explosive contention comes from Mr. Avery’s defense team — that law enforcement officials planted evidence to frame him.
On Monday, Mr. Kratz called the scenario “nonsense,” and he said the jury in Mr. Avery’s trial considered evidence either left out or glossed over by the filmmakers.
That evidence included DNA from Mr. Avery’s sweat found on a latch under the hood of Ms. Halbach’s Toyota RAV4, a discovery made by investigators after they were led there by Mr. Dassey, Mr. Kratz said.
Mr. Avery’s blood was found inside Ms. Halbach’s vehicle, and the documentary explains the defense theory that it could have been planted there by officers who had access to a vial of his blood. Sweat, however, never came up.
“How do you get Avery’s sweat underneath a hood latch of a vehicle?” Mr. Kratz said. “That is completely inconsistent with any kind of planting.”
Mr. Kratz also said a bullet with Ms. Halbach’s DNA on it found in Mr. Avery’s garage was matched to a rifle that hung over Mr. Avery’s bed. The gun was confiscated when officers searched his trailer on Nov. 5, 2005, and the bullet was found in the garage in March 2006, Mr. Kratz said.
“If they planted it, how did they get a bullet that was shot from Avery’s gun before Nov. 5?” he said.
Mr. Strang, the defense attorney, said on Monday that the DNA found under the hood was never identified as sweat and that its presence did not require that Mr. Avery touched the car. And bullet fragments were all over the property, where the family often shot guns. That Ms. Halbach’s DNA was on the bullet “really didn’t move the needle one way or another,” Mr. Strang said.
Mr. Kratz acknowledged some missteps in the handling of Mr. Avery’s case, saying he wished the Manitowoc County sheriff’s deputies had been less involved in the investigation. “That made the case a little more challenging for me, because I certainly took every step to keep those people out of it,” he said.
He also expressed regret about a news conference he held when Mr. Dassey was charged in early 2006. The documentary portrayed the prosecutor’s lurid description of the rape and murder of Ms. Halbach in front of a bank of news microphones as polluting the potential juror pool.
Mr. Kratz thought, at the time, that it was important to refute accusations of wrongdoing by law enforcement officers, he said.
“In retrospect, I wish I would have simply released the complaint and allowed the media to cover that however they wanted to,” he said.
Ms. Ricciardi and Ms. Demos on Monday disputed the idea that they were working on Mr. Avery’s behalf. They were inspired to create the documentary after reading about the new charges against him on the
front page of The New York Times in 2005, Ms. Ricciardi said.
“He was uniquely positioned to take us and viewers from one extreme of the American criminal justice system to the other,” she said.
Ms. Ricciardi rejected the accusations of bias from Mr. Kratz, saying that his refusal to be interviewed for the documentary rendered them baseless. Mr. Kratz, who resigned as prosecutor in 2010, said he declined to participate because he did not believe the film would be impartial.
Neither the groundswell of outrage over the case, nor the
attacks that have been directed at him personally, have shaken Mr. Kratz’s certainty that justice was served.
“Steven Avery committed this murder and this mutilation, and Steven Avery is exactly where he needs to be,” he said. “And I don’t have any qualms about that, nor do I lose any sleep over that.”
