Making A Murderer

Trying defendants together is a little unusual. Most of the time, but not always, they're done separately. In most cases the prosecutor isn't going to want the cases to be joined because instead of getting one defense closing and opening they get two or three or however many defendants there are. And instead of one cross-examination of each witness you get two, three, etc.

In some circumstances it benefits the state and they'll seek to have them joined. That's usually when the defense lawyers start jumping up and down about the cases needing to be severed to protect each defendants right to a fair trial.

It's ethically wrong for the same prosecutor to present two entirely different theories of a case to two different juries, even if the law allows it.

It would've been interesting if they were tried together. Dassey's confession would come into Avery's trial, which has the potential to be incredibly prejudicial to Avery and which otherwise the state couldn't get in. Then again, Avery's lawyers were much better and might've been able to make the state's case look even more absurd than they did. The only way they could alibi each other is if each testified, which Avery chose not to do, and it would come across as self-serving in a joint trial.

 

Thanks for the reply.

Yes, I've seen defense lawyers jumping up and down saying that their cases need to be severed in order to protect their defendant's rights. I guess that's why I assumed the default was to try them together, and that they were separated in order to protect them.

Can they ever make the case that they should be tried together?

 

It's possible, at least in my area. I had it happen to me my first year out of law school. I was dealing with a racially charged fight with relatively minor injuries that happened at a school event. I wanted to try the co-defendants separately, although I didn't have a good argument for why that I could state to the court. One of the defendants was an acquaintance of the best defense attorney in town, who agreed to take the case pro bono. He recruited another high-profile lawyer to represent the other defendant. These were two lawyers who primarily only defend serious violent felonies and they're dipping down to take on a couple of misdemeanors, for free. At that point, I had not had a full jury trial yet. They managed to convince a judge that the two cases should be done together for the sake of efficiency.

Before the trial started I got pulled into another matter and another junior prosecutor was forced to jump in - a practice that was quite common in our office for misdemeanor cases. I felt bad that his first jury trial ended up being that one, since I had done all the prep, but he got a great story out of it. The state's case got shredded.

 

Huh. Interesting.

Dassey would have certainly benefitted from having his case tried along with the Avery's much better lawyers, and their budget, I would think, even if it didn't allow him to just point the finger at Avery.

 

A crush that went too far was the best I could come up with as well. But it seems like he had too much to lose. Of course, I'm trying to approach this with a level of rationality that no one in the Avery family seems to possess.

I also thought it was odd that the judge wouldn't allow the defense to explicitly say who they thought killed Halbach. If I'm correct, Strang's argument wasn't that the police actually KILLED her, just that they framed him for her murder, correct?

 

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.

‘Making a Murderer’ Defense Attorney Dean Strang: We May Represent Steven Avery Again

 

There are times when I've wondered if Avery killed her, but off in the woods or in a different part of the compound so that he wouldn't have much to clean up. He then left just enough evidence behind—The car, the bones, her key, etc—to raise suspicion so the cops would harass him again. He would cry frame job and because of his sexual assault case, he would get off and help to bolster his lawsuit. Of course this is an extremely complicated thing to pull off and he is just dumb enough to not think it all the way through and was convicted.

The other less convoluted possibility (apart from just black and white he did it and was too cocky to cover his tracks better) is that his one or two of his brothers committed the crime and figured correctly that the police would go after Avery pretty hard. They stopped the photographer after she was leaving the shoot, tried to have sex with her and she refused. They sexually assaulted her and killed her, shooting her in the head with a gun that was readily available to all members of the family and left evidence lying around to make it look like Steven did it. They burned her body, moved the bones to Steven's burn pit after he had a bonfire and left car near his trailer. They used their connection with the Sheriff's Department (wasn't one of them married to a deputy back in the 80s?) to get Steven's blood from the evidence locker and planted it in the car. They took advantage of the over zealousness of the Sheriff's Department and tipped off Coburn about the car, which he found but knew he couldn't be the one to find it because of the lawsuit. He then gets that crazy volunteer to "find" the car and they went from there. The police started finding evidence to nail Steven, but knew it wasn't enough (before finding the bullet). Lt. Lenz planted the key to make their case even stronger, believing Steven was guilty. This is why there is zero evidence of her blood in Steven's trailer, why Steven's blood is found in her car, why Steven doesn't crush the car nor does he remove the license plate and why no blood is found in the garage.

 

These guys were all Packers fans, right?

 

This second theory makes a hell of a lot more sense than Avery killing her with no blood evidence anywhere in a dirty, cluttered garage.

 

Dam Wetzel had some good thoughts in a two-part piece on his tumblr page. I tried to post a link here but I'm on my phone and it posted the entire thing, which was looooong. You people love your Googling. You can find it if you want it. Nothing groundbreaking but still a good read.

 

Thanks!