A Time-Honoured Way to Fight Injustice; Making A Murder, a 21st-century Take on Emile Zola's 'J'accuse

MAKING A MURDERER
NETFLIX
THE NATIONAL POST

On Jan. 13, 1898, the Paris paper L'Aurore published Emile Zola's open letter “J'Accuse”. The institution he was accusing was the French army, which had sentenced the Jewish officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus to penal servitude on Devil's Island for selling military secrets to the Germans and had suppressed the evidence of another officer's guilt. Zola was sued for libel and fled to England, but the effect of his letter was to blow the Dreyfus affair wide open and to expose the conspiracy behind it. Dreyfus was pardoned on the condition that he admit guilt which, as it was his only way of getting off the island, he did.

So the use of available media to protest a miscarriage of justice has ample, even noble, historical precedent. Zola used the press. The 10-part documentary Making a Murderer uses Netflix to tell the story (we're long past spoiler alerts here) of Steven Avery, scrap dealer, of Manitowoc, Wisc., who, beginning in 1985, served 18 years on a charge of rape before being exonerated. Two years after getting out he was accused and convicted of another crime, a murder, also possibly involving a rape; so now he's serving another term, this time with no prospect of release. He was clearly railroaded in the first case and many people, probably including the makers of the film, believe that he was framed again in the second.

There are obvious huge differences between the cases. Everyone knows that Dreyfus was innocent. With Avery, it's not impossible that he was both guilty and framed. Still, there are some odd parallels. After Dreyfus' conviction, a curious French officer found evidence pointing to the real traitor. The French court chose to disregard this and had the offending sleuth transferred overseas. In the Avery rape case, the Manitowoc police similarly chose to ignore suggestions from an adjoining jurisdiction pointing to the guilt of another man, a serial rapist who subsequently confessed and whose DNA testing led to Avery's exoneration. The crucial documents used to convict Dreyfus were forged by a Major Henry who, when his actions were discovered, committed suicide. Somewhat less dramatically, Ken Kratz, the district attorney who was the prosecutor in Avery's murder trial, had to resign his position five years later after complaints of online sexual harassment. His comeuppance was one of the few cheering moments in Making a Murderer, since Kratz as prosecutor had come over as both heartless and smug. His closing statement to the jury had included what may be the most extraordinary words ever uttered by a lawyer in a courtroom: "Reasonable doubts are for innocent people." It's hard to know where to start with that one.

You can't, as they say, make this stuff up; and Making a Murderer didn't have to. As well as its own interviews it had trial footage, recorded phone calls, and - most chillingly - video records of interrogations. It took the writer-producers, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, 10 years to sort through and assemble the material, and no wonder. Tuning in for the first time, knowing little of the Avery story, I had assumed that episode one would deal with the rape case and episode two with the murder, and that would be that. I could hardly believe that I was in for 10 hours. John Moore in the National Post recently wrote that he thought it altogether too much, and I'll concede that they might have got through it in nine. Overall though, length was strength. This was especially true of the scenes in court, especially those of Avery's murder trial, which were hypnotic.

It's generally agreed that trials make for mesmerizing drama. Kenneth Tynan had a theory that their power derives from the witnesses on the stand having no choice but to answer their inquisitors; they can't simply walk away from a painful or embarrassing question as one might in everyday life. "Nothing" Tynan said "is harder to write than a bad trial scene." Making a Murderer didn't even have to write a scene; it was already there, and, considered strictly as television, it was better than most madeup drama.

It worked, though, like drama. It even had the trappings. It presented itself as the most rigorous of documentaries - no narrative voice-over, the baldest of captions to keep us clear on chronology - but it indulged itself with mood music, bleak views of the rusting cars in the Avery junkyard, prolonged surveys of hopeless wintry landscapes, all very reminiscent of True Detective. Though this might have been called False Detective since much of the program's power lay in its indictment of the Manitowoc Sheriff 's Department who, with Avery suing them for millions of dollars over their mishandling of the rape case, had every inducement to have him put away for the murder of Teresa Halbach. The evidence for the planting of evidence seemed overwhelming. Indeed one ended up rooting for Avery in part because the forces arrayed against him seemed so detestable, up to and including the judge, whose sentencing speech was as virulent towards the whitetrash Avery as the French judges were to Dreyfus the Jew. It was almost beyond belief that the same judge who had condemned Avery was allowed to preside over his appeal. As Steven himself sagely remarked, he didn't stand a chance.

Avery and his supporters got to speak directly to camera; their opponents didn't, though apparently not for want of being asked. (They then got to complain about the film-makers being biased against them.) They were still, thanks to the archive footage, vividly present: characters all. But then so was everybody who appeared. You couldn't make them up, either, though many writers and actors would surely love to. The defence lawyers, in particular, were a parade of casting director's dreams: the local lady, folksy but sharp, who was Steven's first resource on the rape charge and who declared that he wasn't smart enough to be guilty; the silky, avuncular public defender who succeeded her; the sophisticated dream team at the murder trial - clever, painstakingly decent men whose very names, Dean and Jerry, seemed to have predestined them to be a double act. (As did their statures: one short, one tall.)

Then there were Steven's parents: the defiant mother who could be a dead ringer for Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, the father angry but resigned; unlike John Moore, I thought his final appearance tending his garden both moving and relevant.

There was Steven himself, perpetually baby-faced (they kept showing his baby pictures for comparison) even as the rest of him aged disturbingly; we were told he had an IQ of 70, though he always seemed remarkably logical and articulate; you may not have liked him but it was hard while watching not to believe him. (And, unlike Dreyfus, he never, on either charge, took the option of a guilty plea. Instead he immersed himself in law-books.) Even more disturbing was his nephew Brendan Dassey, a 16-year old boy, convicted as his uncle's accomplice; the two were tried separately, with the same DA presenting scenarios that cancelled one another out. We saw Brendan, educationally subnormal and with no parent or lawyer present, goaded and bewildered into making a confession - which he subsequently and repeatedly and unavailingly retracted. (When his mother, on the phone, asked him why he had told the investigators what he thought they wanted to hear, he said "that's how I do my homework." It's on tape. Like his request that, having confessed to murder, he be allowed to go home to complete a school project.) It's ironic: since interrogations have to be recorded, Brendan's questioners, coercing him into condemning himself out of his own mouth, condemned themselves out of theirs. Not that they've suffered for it.

Brendan's story must have left most viewers drained and angry; the only fictitious TV to have produced a similar effect, at least in my experience, is the abandonment of another lost boy, Randy, in the fourth season of The Wire. You can argue that it's unfair to use dramatic techniques to plead a real-life case, but I don't see it. Some of Zola's contemporaries doubtless thought he was one-sided as well; you use what resources you have and your opponents have the same option. It seems undeniable that Steven and Brendan deserve, at the least, a re-trial. Two sentences from Dean and Jerry linger most hauntingly in the mind. One, at the end of an episode, was "who better than a police officer would know how to frame someone?" The other, at the end of the series, was Dean's admission that a small part of him hoped Steven was guilty, because if he were innocent the thought of what has been visited upon him would be unbearable.