Legality and the Spectacle of Murder

The true crime genre has a storied history captivating audiences and unearthing the uneven political and human elements to the criminal justice process. Indeed, such recent media texts as the WBEZ public radio podcast Serial (2014–), HBO’s docuseries The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015), and the Netflix series Making a Murderer (2015) exemplify the current trends in entertainment media’s depictions of true crime. In contrast to scripted programs such as FOX’s America’s Most Wanted (1988-2012), truTV’s The Forensic Files (1996–2011), or FX’s American Crime Story (2016–), Making a Murderer offers unique insights into the cultural, economic, and political contexts of the contemporary criminal justice system.

Making a Murderer follows Steven Avery, a man who was convicted in 1985 of the sexual assault and attempted murder of Penny Beernsten, a woman who was attacked while jogging near her home. Exonerated in 2003, he was later accused in 2005 of murdering Teresa Halbach, a local Wisconsin photographer. The series has been widely praised by media critics as “harrowing” (Cruz 2015) and “instantly absorbing” (VanDerWerff 2015). Moreover, the series achieved acclaim with a wide array of celebrities, such as comedian Ricky Gervais who claimed it was worthy of a Nobel Prize (Shattuck 2015). A closer look at this series, however, provides fruitful analysis for the constitutive nature of law and society.

The docuseries provides an in-depth look at the role that law plays in rural, working-class politics. For example, the series contrasts Avery and his family as working class with little money and education compared to his victims Beernsten and Halbach. Indeed, the Avery family was seen as outsiders and “something different” even in their small, rural Wisconsin community. The insider/outsider dynamic undoubtedly played a role in Avery’s perspective, as lacking trust from the community necessitates social, political, and economic exclusion (Engel 1984). Moreover, money, both as an incentive and as a tool for social control, haunted the Averys, within both Steven’s case for justice due to his wrongful imprisonment and in obtaining adequate legal representation in his murder trial. As Avery’s civil rights attorney Stephen Glynn noted, “One of the realities for someone like Steven Avery, someone who has no money, is that the insurance companies would … offer $1,000,000 to drop the case.” More than simple coercion, the working-class dynamics presented in the series highlight the ways in which money acts as a deterrent for claims making and litigation in the legal system (Gilliom 2001; Merry 1990). For someone like Avery, who would have needed to spend a large sum of money to even consider successfully winning his case, Avery rightfully noted, “Poor people lose. Poor people lose all the time.”

Making a Murderer also proves useful for observing the interaction of law with the larger social structure through media coverage of this case. First, the Wisconsin media effetely painted Avery as an individual of low intelligence, who was both dangerous and different from the community. Beginning in 2003 at his exoneration of the 1985 murder, and continuing to his subsequent arrest in 2005, Steven Avery became a media spectacle. What Making a Murderer did well was provide cogent examples of the ways in which the legal system easily becomes an arena for entertainment. In the fourth episode (“Indefensible”), which largely focused on local media reactions to Avery’s arrest for the murder of Teresa Halbach, a Dateline National Broadcasting Company (NBC) reporter was quoted as saying,

This is the perfect Dateline story; it is a story with a twist, it grabs people’s attention … right now murder is hot. That’s what everyone wants, that’s what the competition wants and we are trying to beat out other networks to get that perfect murder story. (p. 1.04)

The series thus presented coverage of Avery’s case both as a commodity, something that sells on the capitalist marketplace, and as a sensationalized event in which locals vicariously take part. Indeed, as scholars Haltom and McCann (2004) noted, the media play a critical role in shaping legal narratives to the point where legal cases begin to take on a life of their own—something outside the legal process itself.

Ultimately, the series is less about whether or not Steven Avery is “innocent” or “guilty” of his crimes. Rather, the series highlights the pervasive corruption at all levels of the judicial system (Bach 2009). Despite the high quality of the series, and the issues it raises, it does leave viewers with questions. Particularly, one wonders if Avery were a person of color how either case would have turned out? Given the attention to the cases of Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and the gross misconduct of law enforcement in each case, has Making a Murderer gained the success it has based on who it is representing? Regardless, Making a Murderer would be invaluable to criminology, law and society, the sociology of law, and deviant behavior classes precisely because it examines the political, psychological, and sociological components of the criminal justice system.