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Making a Murder Directors Explain Why They Left Some Information Out As Steven Avery’s Legal Team Says There’s New Evidence

By Patricia Grannum
Published on: 08:13 PST, Jan 13, 2016

Making a Murderer binge watchers beware. There’s information that the documentary left out, which may cause you to reconsider whether you think Steven Avery is innocent or guilty of killing Teresa Halbach.

The New York Times recently interviewed Ken Kratz, the prosecutor in the Avery case and he slammed Making a Murderer directors, Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi for omitting crucial infromation from their 10-part docu-series.

He called Making a Murderer a tool for Steven Avery’s defense and a ploy to “stoke public outrage.”

“That’s exactly what they wanted to happen.” Kratz said, after claiming that the series presents a lot of misinformaton.

As Us Weekly reports the Netflix documentary directors have admitted that they did leave information out, but claim they had their reasons. A lot of it had to do with time. Both directors said that they focused on presenting the key elements of the prosecutions case because posting hours of unedited trial footage would not have appealed to viewers.

“Our opinion is that we presented the prosecution’s most compelling evidence,” Ricciardi said.

In an interview with Vox, the Making A Murderer directors urged the public to closely examine Ken Kratz’s statements about the information the left out of the documentary series.

“What’s troubling now is that Ken Kratz is coming out in the media and making statements about evidence that was left out, but nobody’s asking him what his sources are, and nobody’s fact-checking that evidence,” Demos asid during the interview.”This is a man who takes a piece of information and stretches it and twists it and turns it into a story, and if you look at any one of these things he’s mentioning, the seed of where his story starts is very far away from what he’s saying in the media.”

She urged the public to read the court transcripts to truly evaluate the information Kratz says they left out.

“We would encourage anyone who is taking what Ken Kratz says at face value to take that information and claims of evidence and go back to the transcripts,” she said. “Go to any part of the public record, and check what he’s saying.”

Making a Murderer follows the legal ups and downs of Steven Avery, a Wisconsin man convicted of murder, currently serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. The prosecution claimed that he was the last person to see Teresa Halbach, a photographer for Auto Trader Magazine, alive. Teresa had been at his home to take photos of a vehicle. Her abandoned car and burnt remains were subsequently found on his property. Avery’s nephew, Brendan Dassey was also convicted as an accomplice in the murder and received a life sentence. He will be eligible for parole in 2048. Stephen had been previously convicted of rape in the 1980s, but was released after serving 18 years in prison when DNA analysis exonerated him. Throughout the documentary, Avery claims that he is innocent of the Halbach murder and says he believes he was framed by law enforcement in the county.

The documentary seems to give a lot of weight to this argument as it routinely points out conflicts of interest and indications of evidence mishandling. But in his New York Times interview Kratz says that Making a Murder omitted these key elements of the prosecution’s case against Steven Avery.

  • DNA from Mr Avery’s sweat was found under the hood latch of Ms Hallbach’s Toyota Rav4. Kratz claims that that would have been pretty much impossible for the police to plant. The documentary focuses a lot on how police could have planted Steven Avery’s blood in the vehicle, but sweat is never even mentioned.
  • There was a bullet with Halbach’s blood on the Avery compound that could have only been fired by the gun that hung over his bed. The gun had been confiscated by the police in November 2005 and the bullet was found in March 2006.

Mr Avery’s former lawyer, Dean Strang, has posed counter-arguments to these allegations though. He told the New York Times that the DNA evidence found under the latch was never identified as sweat. Also, Strang says there were bullets and bullet fragments all over the compound. Whether Halbach’s DNA was on it or not, “did not move the needle one way or another” Strang said.

Us Weekly reports that Steven Avery has a new legal team who filed an appeal to have his case conviction thrown out on January 11., his new lawyer has said that she believes the conviction will be overturned because of “new evidence” in the case.

[Photo via Youtube Screen Shot]

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