The interrogation of Brendon Dassey from Netflix's "Making a Murderer"
I loved the new Netflix documentary Making a Murderer. It was fascinating, compelling, infuriating. As someone who works in video, I’m damn impressed with how well the filmmakers were able to compile and compress what had to have been thousands and thousands of hours of footage. As a Wisconsin resident, I thought it was an important, if hard to watch, look at our state.
Along with all of that, I know that the documentary is wildly biased towards the defense — and I don’t think that is a bad thing. Almost all media coverage about crime is biased; 99% of it just happens to be biased towards the investigations and the prosecution.
It doesn’t matter if it is a true crime show on Investigation Discovery or a scripted drama on a major network — almost all of the TV shows about murder follow the exact same formula. The show opens with a horrific crime. Then, investigators do their due diligence and piece together evidence. Sometimes they go down a dead end, but they eventually find the right person, either through a confession or rock-solid evidence like DNA at the crime scene.
In these shows, the constitutional rights and civil liberties of the defendant are viewed as roadblocks slowing the inevitable march to justice. When a cop does go all Jack Bauer and break the rules, the audience knows he is doing it for the greater good.
Film is a bit more evenhanded, telling the occasional story of the wrongly accused. But when the protagonists are defense attorneys, they are portrayed as flawed, crooked characters who stumble into a morally righteous cause. Think of Matthew McConaughey’s role in The Lincoln Lawyer. We don’t even get to idolize Atticus Finch anymore, leaving Joe Pesci’s My Cousin Vinny as the most admirable defense attorney of the silver screen.
As media consumers, we are pounded with these messages over and over again, and that makes an impact. We tend to trust the police, and we trust our justice system to do the right thing.
You can see the evidence of that in the media coverage surrounding Steven Avery before the trial. Prosecutors released teenager Brendan Dassey’s confession into the wild, and the media, in the Green Bay market and nationwide passed it on as gospel truth. Even if you discount the slant of Making a Murderer, it’s hard to watch that confession footage and feel good about how it was collected. Many Wisconsinites, maybe even some of the jurors, heard the details of the confession and made up their minds — but they never saw how the sausage was made. They trusted that the cops were doing the right thing to put away the bad guys.
Criminal investigations and trials are messy, imperfect things. That is why “beyond a reasonable doubt” standards exist. Television tries to make these stories simple and clean but that does a disservice to the accused. We give our police, sheriff departments and prosecutors incredible power, and sometimes we don’t scrutinize what they do with that power.
I am in no way sure that Steven Avery is innocent, but that wasn’t the point of the series for me. Making a Murderer and podcasts like the first season of Serial aren’t perfect, but they let viewers and listeners see things from a different perspective. They ask us to question the “putting away the bad guys” formula.
In this day and age, we could all do with a little more questioning and little less certainty.
