So I have to ask, on the FB discussion group quite a few people think Bobby Dassey is the guilty party. Thoughts?

I think I might watch Season 1 again and then resume Season 2...

 

A whole lot of evidence pointed to the step dad


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Dateline is doing a segment on Steven tomorrow night if anyone is interested.


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From my viewpoint, the special prosecutor and investigator were trying too hard to make their point on Dateline. The investigator actually defended how he handled Brendan's interrogation. The prosecutor is a scumbag who sent lewd texts to a domestic violence victim whose boyfriend he was prosecuting. Both have lost credibility in my book.

 

Making a Murderer lawyer Kathleen Zellner: Why she took Steven Avery's case and the latest 'really significant' tip-off

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/on-dema...lawyer-kathleen-zellner-wealthy-can-get-away/

 

It's free to subscribe but because i'm super nice and because i brought this article into your life:

“There’s nothing as satisfying as doing this,” says Kathleen Zellner. “Once you’ve experienced the success of saving someone’s life, you can’t really top that.” The Chicago attorney whose spellbinding presence dominates the second series of Netflix’s true-crime documentary Making a Murderer first saved an innocent man from death row in 1994. Since then, she has freed more wrongly convicted men than any other lawyer in America (20 in total).

Zellner’s goal in the series is to overturn the verdict against salvage yard worker Steven Avery – sentenced to life without parole in Wisconsin in 2005 for the murder of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach. Sensitivities do not come into her attempts to dismantle the story told to the jury.

A weighted dummy with hair dripping in blood is flung into the boot of a car to try to reproduce the spatter of the victim’s blood; bullets are fired through the shoulder blades of a cow to imitate them passing through her skull. “You’ve got to be an obsessive kind of personality to do this,” Zellner says.

Zellner, 61, is visually arresting, dressed in suits and snakeskin prints, her face a controlled mask, her precise arguments framed in a side of the mouth drawl; you notice the eloquence of her long fingers, with their long, painted nails, as she points out another hole in the prosecution’s case – “it was full of holes,” she tells me.


Zellner is aware that since the second series, following the case of Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey, also convicted of Halbach’s murder on the basis of a controversial confession, her methods are being scrutinised by millions. “I’ve tried to block that as much as I can,” she says. For some people, she notes, “it’s as if they’re handling the case”.

Some have suggested she was drawn to take part in the high-profile series for the fame. “When people talk about that I wanna laugh,” she says. “It’s just not true. I was already well known, and I’d already accomplished financial success.” She was originally a corporate lawyer (“I won a lot of verdicts”) and the Joseph Burrows case in 1994, where a female killer finally confessed to the murder, had international news coverage. “I’ve turned down book deals, I’ve turned down TV – Dick Wolf (the creator of Law & Order) approached me about doing a series in the mid Nineties. If I were interested in all of that, I wouldn’t be sitting here doing these cases pro bono.”

She funds her work on wrongful convictions through other work at her practice and has spent up to $1m of her own money to win a case, as she did to free Ryan Ferguson in 2013. He had spent nearly ten years in prison for the murder of a sports editor, based on two false testimonies. There is an emotional burden as well, as prisoners and their relatives start to rely on Zellner as their only chance. “I’ve had the experience before many times with families,” she says, “but you never really get used to it. It’s difficult to have people counting on you that much.”


She escapes from her days dwelling in darkness and death to a five-acre wooded country estate where she lives with her husband and their dogs. Her daughter Anne is a lawyer in Colorado. Her husband Robert is a commodities trader and a former President and CEO of Citicorp Futures, a subsidiary of Citicorp Inc. She says she’s thought “a million times” that it’s lucky her husband is not a lawyer, too. “It would have driven me to craziness if I’d been married to a lawyer,” she says.

“We just walk totally away from all of this,” she says. “I swim a lot, I find that really relaxing. I love watching movies, reading books. Outside of this, my life is very quiet and peaceful.”

Zellner was born in Texas, but grew up in Oklahoma, the second eldest of seven children. She got her empathy from her mother, a chemist who later went into nursing. Her father discovered oil fields all over the world. “He was a very incisive thinker – I got my sense of adventure from him but also the ability to deconstruct arguments, look at evidence.”

Zellner agreed to take on Avery’s case in 2016, after Making a Murderer was released. Avery had been writing to her since 2012, after his fiancé Sandy Greenman had seen her on TV and thought, “that’s the person who’s going to get Steven out”.

But Zellner’s office had rejected him because of the forensic evidence tying him to the murder. “We have so many letters, and I’ve got my clerks doing initial reviews,” Zellner says. “We have a criterion to get to the people that are innocent, and he was the outlier, because you learn that his blood is in her car, his DNA is on her key, her DNA is on a bullet in his garage, her bones are in his burn pit. There was so much.”

But when she was finally persuaded to watch the series by a client she had exonerated, she says, “I realised there was something really wrong with the forensic evidence.” She had recently overturned the murder conviction of Mario Casciaro, where “the blood spatter completely refuted the state’s case”.

She also had a conversation with the former FBI criminal profiling expert John Douglas, who wrote the book Mindhunter, on which the Netflix drama of the same name is based. Douglas told Zellner that based on Avery’s demeanor, he did not think he presented like a violent person.

Zellner says she thinks there was a “tremendous pushback from the state” after the first series. “They thought they’d been embarrassed on a worldwide stage.” In the series, her 1,272 page motion for a retrial was denied. She is now preparing to file a brief at the appellate court in December.

She may have a better chance with this since the mid-term elections last week changed Wisconsin’s political landscape. Out went Governor Scott Walker, losing to Democrat Scott Evers, and out went Attorney General Brad Schimel to be replaced by Democrat Josh Kaul. “I have always believed that Schimel had never spent any time on the case files of Steven Avery and Brendan, he knew nothing about the facts,” Zellner says. (Her ire extends to original prosecutor Ken Kratz, who stepped down after a sexting scandal involving a domestic violence victim – “a lot of states you’d go to jail for that”.)

Has she been on the phone to the incomers? “I have not and that wouldn’t be my approach,” she says, but adds, “I think it’s a good sign.

“The new attorney general has a very impressive background, he has a Stanford law degree. His mother was the attorney general, but he is not tied to the kind of old boys’ club in Wisconsin in the legal community. That’s extremely important because you don’t have somebody who’s tied back to the prosecutor and is going to be very biased.”

She stresses, however, that if people think she may approach Evers and Kaul seeking a pardon for Avery, “that will never happen – you don’t seek pardons for clients that are innocent”.


Making a Murderer may even have influenced the election: Zellner says she had messages from Wisconsin residents who said they were going to vote against Walker and Schimel after watching the documentary.

She notes that the political dimension of the legal system in the US can get in the way of justice. Partisan politics are perhaps at their starkest in the make-up of the Supreme Court, although Zellner says in Avery’s case, “the chances that you are going to end up at the US Supreme Court are almost zero. As you can see, they had no interest in Brendan Dassey’s case.”

Dassey’s legal team asked the Supreme Court to hear the case in February, after an appeal reversed an earlier decision to free him on the basis that his confession was coerced. “I’m very empathetic with his lawyers,” she says, “because I know [that decision] had to be devastating to them.” Zellner says simply that the situation the vulnerable Dassey was thrown into, interviewed alone as a 16-year-old with a low IQ, was “a travesty”.

She says that there is “no question” that the American justice system is set up to protect the strong over the weak. “A guilty person who is wealthy is much more likely to get away with a murder than someone who is poor. They just have enormous resources. I would say without hesitation that the OJ Simpson case is the example of that.”


The biggest flaw in the system, however, Zellner says is that prosecutors enjoy absolute immunity, “so they can literally violate the constitution, suborn perjury, hide evidence and they’re never gonna be held accountable… no one should be above the law. “We’ve got great prosecutors,” she insists, “but we’ve definitely got corrupt prosecutors.

“The way to stop this behaviour of stealing people’s lives away from them is accountability, and the punishment has to be severe. That’s why these officers in police shooting cases must be held criminally accountable. So far in the US, there’s just been one prosecutor, who became a judge (Ken Anderson in the Michael Morton exoneration case), who went to jail for framing somebody. But that’s got to happen to make it stop.”

Since the second series of Making a Murderer was released in October, viewers have been contacting her. “We’ve gotten a tip in the last 24 hours that we think is really significant. It has to do with Teresa Halbach’s car – we spent most of yesterday following up on it.” Scientists have also been volunteering their time and a couple of potential witnesses have claimed to have information on alternative suspects on Zellner’s list – “people are starting to talk”.

She regularly takes to Twitter to discuss developments and respond to #AskZellner questions, including one recently from pop star Lily Allen. Ricky Gervais and Avril Lavigne are also following the case, she says.


I take the chance to ask one of my own. Does she think it's possible that any of her alternative suspects – who include a nephew of Avery’s, and Halbach’s former boyfriend – would have the intelligence to take a pipette of blood from the sink in Steven Avery’s trailer, where he claims he had bled from a cut on his thumb, and plant it in Theresa Halbach’s car.

“Yes, I do,” Zellner says, “because I know that’s happened on other cases. The average person has so much more knowledge about DNA or blood, and this was just a simple thing where they wiped up some blood – you literally could just take a wet sponge and wipe it out – then you just drip it.”

Does she think the high-profile nature of the show might have harmed Avery’s chances? “I think that it’s created an additional risk, but I still believe that the system works.” And what if she fails? “Nothing can take away from me what I’ve already accomplished… I am funding this as a private individual. Who else is doing that in America?”

 

@Jama i thought the same exact thing about her ignoring and ignoring the letters until after the first season came out. I noticed that timeline right away while i was watching Season 2. I understand that she probably gets many, many letters asking for her help...but it was interesting that she waited until the show aired. I guess it's possible the show just helped bring it to her attention instead of being one of many letters.

While watching Season 2 I've honestly never been more torn about what I think of this case. At the beginning I was pretty confident he was guilty. Now I think he still may be, but there might be more to the story or it may have happened a completely different way than the prosecution put out there. I'm just trying to keep my eye on it and see if any updates come out...at the very least I think Brendan Dassey's confession was BS. I wish his attorneys had succeeded in that.

 

Yeah season 1 had the suspense factor...I still got very caught up in season 2, but it was lacking that element of mystery. I was entertained by it though.

Some things that stood out to me were: the RAV 4 being spotted by a trucker in a different spot than where it was found, and Colburn calling in the license plate in sort of a mysterious manner...and Bobby Dassey's computer searches. There must have been some reason his hard drive wasn't brought into the trial though. Maybe it was a shared computer and there was no way of knowing who used it at what times.

The rest of the stuff she found was compelling too...and had it been brought up during the original trial it may have given the jury enough reasonable doubt.

 

Yeah that raised some red flags for sure...and didn't she say she resigned because of it? That was very strange to me... I would love for something to happen where someone just loses their mind and confesses everything. I NEED ANSWERS! lol

 

Kathleen Zellner just posted this update thread on her Twitter feed...you have to click on it to see the numbered tweets going down...

https://twitter.com/ZellnerLaw/status/1063137091746496512

After that, she answered peoples' questions in a bunch more tweets.

 

@southernlady @Jama

https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/18/entertainment/making-a-murderer-defamation-lawsuit-trnd/index.html

 

I have a lot of family and friends in Wisconsin. Two cousins live in Oconomowoc. All think he is guilty of killing her.

And no. I have not watched the series.


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You should. It’s so good.

 

I’m taking my peoples word for it, and think he’s guilty.




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