‘Making a Murderer’ Lawyers Admit Doubt of Steven Avery’s Innocence .
The media storm surrounding Netflix’s highly tweetable Making a Murdererdocuseries continues, this time with some predictably enlightening thoughts from Steven Avery‘s defense attorneys. Though we’ve heard from the series’ directors regarding their post-Netflix feelings on Avery’s innocence (including a direct challenge to the state’s handling of Avery’s trial), and we’ve certainly heard plenty from those insisting that the series omitted purportedly shocking evidence in the prosecutors’ favor, Dean Strang and Jerry Buting‘s appearance onCBS This Morning marks their first joint interview since Making a Murderer debuted.
“I’m not convinced of his guilt,” Strang says, a statement firmly in line with remarks from director Laura Ricciardi. “If it was okay to convict people on maybes, I wouldn’t be worried about this. [But] it’s not.” Though Strang reveals that he “absolutely” has doubts regarding Avery’s innocence, he insists that a simply guilty / innocent argument is simply not the point. “I think his best hope lies in newly discovered evidence,” Strang says of revived attempts at proving that Avery was framed by Manitowoc County authorities.
Speaking directly to the flurry of criticism aimed at the 10-hour series’ decision to omit what was originally a “200 hour” trial, Buting wastes no words when highlighting the apparent embellishment of such claims. “The state is now trying to make that a lot of these pieces that weren’t in the movie more sinister than they really were,” Buting argues. “It’s nonsense to say large parts of the state’s case were left out.” Pointing specifically to evidence suggesting Avery placed calls to Teresa Halbach’s phone on the day of her alleged murder, Buting adds that Avery’s call to Halbach’s office to schedule an appointment was also omitted. “Why would you call the office and create a paper trail?” Buting asks. “You would just call her directly and no one would ever know that she had come there. He went through the office.”
Buting also spoke extensively with Rolling Stone in a separate interview, going further into detail regarding evidence and additional details left out of Making a Murderer, including the alleged burning of Halbach’s corpse:
“We presented an expert who’s from Canada, and he had never testified for anybody but the Crown, the prosecution, before. He was really a world expert on finding cremains outside and in various locations [where one might] try to hide and dispose of a body. And he testified consistently with what we had found in the literature, which is: to burn a body takes either extremely high heat, or a very long, sustained, moderate medium-high type of heat, and it would be very difficult to burn a body in an open pit — an open fire — particularly to the degree that these bone fragments showed. At a crematorium, for instance, they use extremely high heat, and it still takes several hours.
Here, you would have had to continually stoke a fire over, and over, and over for 12, 14, 16 hours — something like that — in order to produce this [type of effect]. And there was no evidence that any fire [like that] had [taken place]. There was a bonfire, but there was no evidence that there was any intense fire like that for such a long, sustained period of time.”
Read the full interview here.
