Unless you’ve been spending a lot of quality time sitting in your dark bedroom closet weeping into your dirty underwear, you couldn’t helped to have not heard about the recent Netflix series ‘Making a Murderer‘. Now, before I get started let me say that I’m very impressed with the depth and detail of the show. The multi-part narrative is explained in such detail that even the most casual viewer is able to clearly see the miscarriage of justice suffered by a man named Steven Avery.
I won’t go into the details of the case here. Steven Avery has every bit of my sympathy but I can’t help but to think about how often this type of judicial bullshit happens.
Television and movies would have you believe crooked justice is a singular conniving event executed by a few, to achieve some mutually beneficial goal. Reality tells us that it is not.
The effortless cohesion used by law enforcement and the judicial system to create such a flimsy, but ultimately successful, criminal case against innocent people like Steven Avery goes unchecked in a small, medium, or large town near you.
Are seriously aware that at any given time, you too, may be made to be guilty of some serious shit just because today’s the day and you crossed the wrong mutha fuker?
If luck is on your side, you only have to suffer the pain of paying a fine for a parking ticket, or some other misdemeanor, that you got served with during your town’s ticket sweep week. Of course, you are free to take the day off of work and go to court to fight the ticket. Most ticket cops won’t show up to the trial because they think you won’t either, hey, you might win. Or, you could say, “Fuck it”, and just pay the money to make it go away.
Now, imagine that you are alone driving somewhere in your car; walking along on your way to wherever; standing still alone; or laying in your own bed in your own house, minding your own damn business when you find yourself to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Next thing you know, you’re surrounded by police and they arrest you because they believe you had something to do with something evil and bad that happened somewhere to someone at some point in time.
That’s crazy, right?
You figure you’ll answer the police’s questions, you’ll give them ID and you do everything you can do to cooperate. You can prove where you were and who you were with, and receipts and other evidence. AND you have rights that are supposed to ensure these things don’t happen, so there’s that.
But what if that doesn’t work? You know you didn’t do it, so now you must get a lawyer to defend your innocence.
The country is so grand and fair that America will provide you with an attorney if you can’t afford one. As long as you don’t mind the fact that your attorney is the also employed by the same state that is trying to send you to jail with flawed evidence.
Imagine if you did all of this and you find yourself on the business end of a judge’s gavel. You are shackled and removed from your life and you don’t even know how. You are innocent but the justice system says you ain’t.
Sounds so dramatic until you think of how often this type of thing happens. The pile of dead bodies created by the police killings is small compared to the amount of people who spend time in jail based on dubious criminal trials.
The court’s response to people wrongfully executed due to a railroad conviction is a shoulder shrug, at best.
I’m loving the attention being paid to Steven Avery’s case, and it’s awesome that the interwebs is advocating on his behalf so that he may, again, be set free from. He deserves to be a free man, allowed to live his life as he sees fit without the persistent threat of incrimination.
And so do the rest of us.