You have not been able to look anywhere in the media the last few weeks without hearing about the Netflix Documentary series “Making a Murderer”. So I finally relented and watched this series about Steven Avery a small town Wisconsin man with a low IQ who was wrongly convicted of rape and assault in 1985 and spent 18 years in prison before he was released due to the innocence project and DNA evidence. Soon after his release and pending lawsuit against the county for 36 Million dollars, he was charged with murder and convicted again and sent back to prison. The major themes of this series is how small town justice can still target and get what they want and eliminate or throw in prison any individual they want. This happened in my hometown of Ada, OK when I was a kid, in fact the story became so famous John Grisham wrote a best seller about it, it was called “An Innocent Man”. In small communities where there is not a lot of jobs or prosperity, the people who hold the money and power lie within the legal system. These are the people who are making 80,000 to 100,000 dollars a year in areas where the median income maybe as low as 25,000 to 30,000 a year. So when the District Attorney, the Sheriff, the Police Chief and the lead Detectives are put into positions where their power, jobs, and financial security are called into question, this leads the power structures to become vulnerable. When that happens it is hard for justice to prevail, because the power structure only wants to keep their jobs and could care less who gets in the way. Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin should immediately commute the sentence of Steven Avery and pardon him, there is no doubt to a reasonable man that Avery was not given his proper constitutionally guaranteed due process and the state did not adequately prove Avery guilty.
