Will This New Special Solve Making A Murderer Mysteries?

If you can’t get enough Steven Avery video content, one of your problems is about to be remedied. Investigation Discovery is producing a news special, Front Page: The Steven Avery Story, which started shooting this week and will air towards the end of the month. The show, hosted by Dateline NBC correspondent Keith Morrison, aims to fill in some of the gaps left by runaway smash Making a Murderer. If you’ve been living under a rock (i.e. without access to streaming video or the internet), Making a Murderer is a 10-hour Netflix docuseries about the trial and (spoilers follow) conviction of Steven Avery and nephew Brendan Dassey for the murder of Teresa Halbach. The special hopes to, per a network release, “better inform viewers in light of the nearly 300,000 people calling for the release of Avery.” So what's left to solve? First, a juror has come forward and said they feel Avery was framed. Second, there are prosecuting attorney Ken Kratz's allegations that the series constituted "misinformation." Chief among the evidence not included in Making a Murderer: Avery's DNA left by sweat underneath a hood latch of Hallbach's car. Between that and some of Hallbach's possessions being found in the burn barrel, there seems to be a lot of evidence that we have yet to see dramatized. In a weird way, you hope that the special makes a strong case for Avery’s guilt. Not to say that the trial wasn’t almost comically unfair (it was) or that Avery wasn’t targeted by law enforcement (that seems likely), but it’s terrible to imagine an innocent man rotting away in jail for life. He’s been messed with before, to the tune of 18 years, but 18 years isn’t life. Still, every new detail suggests that Avery was almost assuredly not given a fair trial. We’d like to think the justice system works, that it always gets the guilty party. But that’s not always the case. It’s also possible that Avery is in fact guilty and that the police planted evidence. How many times have you watched a cop show in which the police think they have their man, but they can’t prove it, so more people die? If the police planted evidence, which Making a Murderer strongly implies that they did, then it was probably (to their thinking) in service of getting a guilty man off the streets. I left Making a Murderer feeling that Avery was innocent and certain that he wasn’t given a fair shake. Given all the other bad news associated with police lately, it’s hard to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt. Whether he’s guilty or innocent, we definitely have yet to see Steven Avery have a fair trial.