nels1031 wrote:




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 motyak wrote:
Let's make sure we're being polite here

Seems cordial so far.

Where's the impoliteness?

 nels1031 wrote:

 whembly wrote:


No... you can't have it both ways.

What the other Avery's may have been convicted in the past has NO bearings for Steven Avery. You're basically attributing the "Sins of family members" on Steven.

Our Justice system doesn't work like that.

Not sure what I'm trying to have both ways.

I'm not attributing "sins of family members" on Steven Avery, just lamenting how they are never brought up in this documentary. As I've said a few times, it would've changed the dynamic of this documentary, and all of the discussions/theories following it, if we the viewer knew that there were other rapists on the site of Theresa Halbachs murder.






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 motyak wrote:
Let's make sure we're being polite here

Seems cordial so far.

Where's the impoliteness?

 nels1031 wrote:


Yeah, thats state law in their parts from what I read. That is weird.

I think the "police framing" defense was only used because thats the only avenue available in a case that was pretty clear cut.

 nels1031 wrote:


Alright, we can eliminate that and any other physical items. Still plenty of opportunity to plant other trace DNA.

And depending on what conspiracy theory you put stock into, they would've known she was burnt up along with her things.

 nels1031 wrote:
I disagree.

These conspiracy theories hinge on the officers betting with their very livelihood and lives if they were caught framing Steve Avery.

 nels1031 wrote:

What conspiracy theory do you believe, btw? Not a zinger. Genuinely curious.

 nels1031 wrote:
[feth him and his trash family.

 whembly wrote:
Another thing that bugged me... during the trial, in an interview the sheriff went so far to say that it would "have been easier to murder Avery then to frame him" on local TV...

That's just... a stunning thing to say by a sheriff.

Some Clarity to Some of the Evidence in "Making a Murderer"


I have recently watched the documentary series, “Making a Murderer.” I know that everyone has thoughts and opinions after watching this, and I am no different. However, I would just like to share some facts about a few pieces of evidence, and the fault in how they were used. My current profession revolves around making sure scientific tests measure exactly what they are supposed to measure and do so in a consistent, reliable way. It is in this spirit, that I feel like I am allowed to weigh in on the “DNA bullet” and the EDTA detection.

When these tests are developed, there are controls put into place that ensure the test was run correctly. These controls are usually of a positive and negative variety: the positive control will have a known substance or quantity that will produce a result that falls within a specific range and the negative control will produce no result (a zero, nothing detected, etc.). In order to be able to produce results that can be labeled “scientifically valid,” the test must contain controls. If something comes up in the negative control, it is an invalid test. If the positive control produces a result that is abnormal or out of range, it is an invalid test. An invalid test means, in effect, that there are NO ACTUAL TEST RESULTS. In regards to whatever sample you were testing, in that specific test, there are no results. This prevents reporting of tainted, skewed, and erroneous results.

While DNA testing the bullet, the technician performing the test found that some of her own DNA got into the negative control. Because the negative control was no longer negative, it was an invalid test. Because she used the entire sample, she decided to submit a deviation, so the results from the sample could be used despite an invalid test. This is extremely poor science at best, and at worst…well, planting evidence and bias doesn't need to be mentioned any more than it already has. Even mentioning that the bullet had the victim’s DNA on it is a lie. It was based on an invalid test. Scientists NEVER draw conclusions from an invalid test. The fact that she did not save any sample to be tested again is not the defendant’s fault. It is an error. This situation should have been deemed “inconclusive” or “no test” and, thus, there is no test result that became evidence.

Detecting EDTA from a blood swab sample sounds fairly straightforward. However, without having a documented limit of detection, no scientist can accept what the test can and can’t do. If one does not know what a test can and cannot do, he or she cannot use that test to draw any conclusions. Let’s discuss the “limit of detection.” Imagine one particle of flu virus lands on your arm. There is no person in their right mind that would knowingly be able to feel it land on his or her arm. On the other hand, everyone would be able to feel a brick land on their arm. There is a “limit of detection” that the human sense of touch inherently has.

In regards to the documentary, the test showed that no EDTA was detectable in the blood swabs. Without a limit of detection, this information means nothing, absolutely nothing. It is possible that the test could only detect EDTA if EDTA composed at least 50% of the sample. The amount of EDTA in blood tubes is miniscule, almost negligible compared to the amount of blood. We are talking about 7 milligrams of EDTA in a 4-mL blood tube. If 0.1 mL was taken out, it would, at most, contain 0.2 mg of EDTA. The blood was swabbed from the vehicle, and probably only 1/10 of the blood (0.01 mL of actual blood), thereby diluting it further. The swab used was also wetted with some sort of solvent, maybe 0.1 mL. Now, there’s only 0.002 mg of EDTA in the blood swab. The swab most likely was diluted further for test purposes, probably taking the swab and re-suspending into at least 1 mL of solution. Using my numbers, which are probably conservative, the test would have to be able to detect 0.0002 mg (0.2 µg) of EDTA in 1 mL of sample. Outside of the amount of EDTA present in a 4-mL blood tube, these numbers are hypothetical for illustrative purposes only.

The testing that would have been required to scientifically validate this test would have required some time. After following standard validation procedures, I would have taken blood from an EDTA vial (any blood) and put it onto a vehicle surface. After the blood was completely dry, I would have used the same blood swabbing and collection procedure used during the investigation, and then tested that sample. This would be a positive control, since the technician would know that there was EDTA in that sample. Does the newly-developed test detect the EDTA? If so, repeat it at least 10 times, and you have a strong scientific ground to make the statement that there was no EDTA present in the blood from the vehicle. If the test does not detect EDTA from the experiment above, one cannot make any mention about the presence or absence of EDTA in the blood swabs from the vehicle because the test could not detect EDTA amounts that small.

I do not know all of the work that went into developing the EDTA detection test. However, using the results and drawing a conclusion based on those results, without having a well-defined test with a limit of detection, is a LIE. I will not mention using the results from only 3 swabs to extrapolate results onto the untested swabs. That was just plain unethical, and I am glad a rebuttal witness for the defense made that clear.

I have plenty of opinions about what I saw in the documentary, which I may share later. I just wanted to lay out some facts from the scientific field about what I saw. Based on what I have presented here, pretend the bullet had no trace of the victim, and pretend the blood swabs were never tested for the presence of EDTA. That is what should have been done.

 Dreadwinter wrote:
I thought there was another person in the show that pretty much said the exact same thing?

 generalgrog wrote:
Great now Nancy Grace is chiming in... She says Avery is guilty, further concreting my opinion that he is innocent.

http://www.hlntv.com/shows/nancy-grace/articles/2016/01/05/nancy-grace-questions-steven-avery


GG

‘Making a Murderer’ Defense Attorney Dean Strang: We May Represent Steven Avery Again
The defense lawyer has emerged as the unlikely star of Netflix’s 10-part docuseries. He opens up about the controversial case’s nagging questions.
America’s new favorite defense attorney is still fighting to win justice for Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, man Steven Avery, the subject of Netflix’s hit docuseries Making a Murderer.

Speaking with The Daily Beast Wednesday night from Milwaukee, Avery’s former counsel Dean Strang challenged the supposedly damning evidence used to convict Avery in 2007 for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach, despite the plethora of holes that have outraged viewers since the series’ debut.

“This is a case where I think substantial, real, and reasonable doubts remain about whether an innocent man got convicted,” declared Strang.

Earlier in the day, the bespectacled attorney found himself sparring with former Calumet County District Attorney Ken Kratz on Fox News as both men argued over the case they debated, in and out of court, a decade ago.

Among the contested items of evidence: the bleach-stained jeans of Avery’s then-16-year-old nephew Brendan Dassey, who told investigators in a controversially obtained confession that he helped Avery rape, kill, and burn Halbach’s body; bones identified as Halbach’s found in Avery’s burn pit—but which were most likely burned elsewhere, then moved; leg irons and handcuffs supposedly purchased by Avery which were never admitted as evidence in Avery’s trial; and *67 calls made from Avery to Halbach, who had requested she return to the Avery salvage yard after previously photographing the family’s vehicle for Auto Trader Magazine.

Kratz, meanwhile, emphasized what he described as the case’s “most persuasive evidence”: that investigators found Avery’s DNA on the hood latch of Halbach’s RAV4, which had been discovered on the Avery property concealed in branches. The only problem: None of Avery’s fingerprints were found in or on the car.

Speaking with The Daily Beast, Strang scoffed at Kratz’s conclusion.

“Mr. Kratz feels aggrieved that the evidence of Steven’s DNA on the hood latch, or under the hood, is left out of the film. But there were also no fingerprints there. If the DNA transfer was from his skin to the hood, where are the fingerprints? And you have, probably, both hands on the hood—potentially eight or 10 fingers that could leave at least a partial print.”

The fingerprint issue also raises questions about one of the prosecution’s primary pieces of physical evidence, he says: Avery’s blood, found smeared inside Halbach’s car, supposedly from a cut on his finger—and yet, no fingerprints.

“You have a problem because if he’s wearing gloves, how’s he bleeding?” said Strang, incredulous. “How’s he bleeding externally? And where are the bloody gloves? That became a problem for the state because if he’s wearing gloves, that explains why there’s no fingerprints. But then, how is there blood? If he’s not wearing gloves, blood could be dripping from a cut, okay. But then why are there no fingerprints?

“Look, there aren’t always fingerprints,” he continued. “But that is a problem, because the state thinks he drove the car. You can’t do that without grabbing the steering wheel. You can’t turn the key in the ignition without potentially touching things. You can’t open a car door without using your hands and leaving a fingerprint, potentially.”

Unfortunately for Avery and co-counsel Jerry Buting, the defense’s framing theory—that Avery’s blood had been planted inside the car by overeager law enforcement officers trying to ensure his conviction—was stymied in turn by four letters: EDTA. If Avery had been framed, the anticoagulant used for storing blood in vials should have been detected in the blood sample. An FBI test for the preservative, however, came back negative.

“Initially we were told that the tests hadn’t been done since the O.J. Simpson trial, that they couldn’t be done, it would take weeks or months,” said Strang of the FBI laboratory test the prosecution used to argue that there had been no tampering with Avery’s blood sample.

“We had to have a hearing out of the jury’s presence to see if it was going to be admissible,” he said. “We had no chance at that point to do independent testing, or even to react terribly well to it because we’re being handed the report during trial and then, boom—[expert witness] Mark Lebow is on the stand the next morning.”

At the time of Avery’s trial, Wisconsin state law did not require a Daubert test to hold expert testimony to a higher level of scrutiny—a standard he notes that the state did begin enforcing in the last few years.

“Jerry did try to show that this wasn’t even relevant evidence—that it didn’t clear Wisconsin’s low bar [of admissibility],” Strang explained. “But the judge ruled against us on that. Jerry, in front of the jury, then tried to establish that there were reasons to view the FBI’s hasty work as unreliable.

“I think it was a point at which momentum shifted,” he sighed. “And maybe not fairly.”

Strang and Buting also found their hands tied when they attempted to introduce four alternate possible suspects who might have killed Halbach. But Wisconsin case law requires defense to prove motive in said suspects, which they could not do.

“That is a significant asymmetry, because the prosecution in a murder case and most other cases in Wisconsin never has to prove motive against the person on trial,” Strang said. “But Steven Avery didn’t have any motive, either! He had nothing against [Halbach]. She hadn’t done anything to him. There was nothing to suggest he had any motive or some reason to want her dead—and the state doesn’t have to prove motive.”

Strang declined to identify the four unnamed possible suspects he and Buting proposed in their motion, or confirm that they were the quartet Avery later named in a 2009 appeal filing pointing to Dassey’s brother Bobby, stepfather Scott Tadych, and Avery’s own brothers, Charles and Earl.

“I’ve never seen that filing,” said Strang, who admits he “unplugged” soon after the Avery conviction citing the exhausting seven-week trial. It was prudent, then, for new lawyers to take up Avery’s cause post-trial. “I don’t want to undermine him,” Strang said, declining to comment on Avery’s accusations.

Like every Making a Murderer obsessive, Strang took note of the revelation this week by filmmakers Moira Demos and Laura Ricciardi that an unidentified juror believes Avery was framed, and that said juror feared for their own safety if they did not vote to convict during the 2007 trial. He declined to comment on whether that juror’s story might help spur a second chance for Avery.

He confirmed that he and Buting had concerns about the juror revealed to be the father of a Manitowoc County sheriff’s deputy—but not as much as they had over the six potential jurors they struck during jury selection, exhausting their maximum strikes. “You don’t pick a jury. All you can do is unpick the people you think are least fit to serve on the jury,” he explained. “But the concerns about six other potential jurors were greater.”

Although he vividly remembers details of the Avery case, Strang discovered material he’d never before seen regarding the Dassey case that clearly now troubles him. In the documentary, he expresses guilt over seeing Dassey drown in the legal system that would eventually send him to prison for life. The teenager’s story is Making a Murderer’s more heartbreaking thread, as taped phone calls to his mother and footage of his confessional sessions with investigators indicate he has no concept of how badly he’s incriminating himself.

Strang was particularly shocked, he says, watching video of Dassey’s session with the investigator hired by his own defense. That attorney, Len Kachinsky, has since admitted to screwing up his own client’s case by serving him up to federal investigators, whose taped interrogations of Dassey also alarmed Strang.

“Why do we allow the police to pull a developmentally disabled, immature, unsophisticated boy out of class without his parents and take him off and interview him in a manipulative, psychologically sophisticated way with two intelligent adult men—teamed up against a developmentally delayed 16-year-old, naïve boy?” Strang demanded.

How possible was it that Dassey, as the film suggests, instead fabricated the Halbach rape and murder scenario used to convict him because he’d seen the movie Kiss the Girls? “I think there’s a good chance of that,” said Strang. “And the similarities are eerie. That’s a movie I think that would have made a pretty graphic impression on somebody his age. He probably shouldn’t have been watching it.”

There is one answer for the kinds of questions and inconsistencies that plagued both the Avery and Dassey cases, he says: reasonable doubt.

“Guilt has to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is reasonable uncertainty, we err on the side of liberty. There is a question here of whether that standard was really, faithfully applied—or whether the jury could, because of all the awful and largely inadmissible pre-trial information they heard over and over and over again in the more than a year leading up to this trial.”

Strang hinted that he and Buting may return to Avery’s side to fight for a new trial that could exonerate Avery—again.

“Jerry and I both have always been in touch with Steven, on and off,” said Strang, who now leads his own law firm, Strang Bradley LLC in Madison. Buting is a partner in Buting, Williams & Stilling, S.C., an hour away in Brookfield, Wisconsin. “It’s clear that he probably needs formal legal representation [for] the specific, concrete things that a lawyer can do in the coming weeks and months.

“It would depend on what he wants, for one, and two, whether any future legal steps might involve examining whether Jerry and I dropped the ball in some way—whether we were inadequate or the legal term is ineffective, in some way. If some possible avenue of relief might be raising questions about our performance or criticizing our performance then we shouldn’t be the ones to do that.

“He’s not going to be able to pay anybody,” he added. “Money isn’t in the equation. But what is, right now in our eyes, is, what’s best for Steven?”

Strang readily admits he thinks it’s possible that Avery is guilty. But, he argues, “If our system worked on convicting people on maybes, then everybody could pat themselves on the back and go out and have a beer, convicting a man on a maybe. Our system isn’t supposed to work on convicting people on maybes.

“In our system, if we live the values we profess, that means you get to keep your liberty,” he continued. “That means you don’t spend the rest of your life in a cage. Could he be guilty? Sure, he could. Do I think he was proven guilty? No. Do I think there’s a real strong chance he could be innocent? Yes. But that’s just me. I wasn’t asked to decide.”

 whembly wrote:

 generalgrog wrote:
Great now Nancy Grace is chiming in... She says Avery is guilty, further concreting my opinion that he is innocent.

http://www.hlntv.com/shows/nancy-grace/articles/2016/01/05/nancy-grace-questions-steven-avery


GG

Heh...

I'll submit that Avery could've done it. ( think it's more likely some other family member did or, or the ex-boyfriend).

My criticism largely rest on the prosecution and the sheriff dept.

 whembly wrote:

 generalgrog wrote:
Great now Nancy Grace is chiming in... She says Avery is guilty, further concreting my opinion that he is innocent.

http://www.hlntv.com/shows/nancy-grace/articles/2016/01/05/nancy-grace-questions-steven-avery


GG

Heh...

I'll submit that Avery could've done it. ( think it's more likely some other family member did or, or the ex-boyfriend).

My criticism largely rest on the prosecution and the sheriff dept.

 Necros wrote:
I do feel bad for Brendan though. Just watching that scene where the cops are practically confessing for him.. with no lawyer or mom present or anything. that was fracked up.

 nels1031 wrote:
If you are a defense attorney, and you are dealing with a disabled kid, whats the best course of action?

 jasper76 wrote:
I watched the "Jodi interview". She doesnt remember much, claims he was abusive to her, thinks he is capable of murder, thinks he did commit the murder, but doesn't know...she was locked up in jail for a DUI. The facts she gives HLN are inconsistent within the interview itself.

And unfortunately, we have to consider that she may be doing this for money. Also, the association of this interview with Nancy Grace is a discrediting factor. Nancy Grace thinks everyone is guilty by virtue of being accused, and uses television to degrade the very notion of presumption of innocence.

Not saying everything she said was BS, just a tad bit fishy.


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P.S. not really relevant.to what we're discussing, but was that not the worst interviewer you have ever seen?

 nels1031 wrote:

 Necros wrote:
I do feel bad for Brendan though. Just watching that scene where the cops are practically confessing for him.. with no lawyer or mom present or anything. that was fracked up.

If you are a defense attorney, and you are dealing with a disabled kid, whats the best course of action?