Let's Get the Innocence Project On This

First a My Two Cents update: Oshkosh School Superintendent Vicki Cartwright says last night's closed session meeting of the School Board was legal as the request for proposals from health insurance vendors contained a provision that allowed the District to negotiate final details with the winning bidder--so those negotiations could be discussed in closed session.  All discussion on why the Board chose to reject a bid that would have saved taxpayers $4.3-MILLION was held in open session last night.  Now onto today's My Two Cents......

You know who I will be thinking of during today's Brett Kavanaugh vs his accusers Senate hearing?  Steven Avery.  It's not because Making a Murderer Season 2 is coming out next month.  Before he became a cause celebre, Avery was a 22-year old petty criminal in the Manitowoc area.  But he became an accused rapist and attempted murderer in the summer of 1985 when a woman was brutally attacked along a Lake Michigan beach.

That woman picked Avery's photo out of a lineup at the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department--and deputies believed that she recognized her attacker.  She again picked Avery out as her attacker during an in-person line-up--and detectives believed her.  When Avery went on trial, the woman testified that it was Avery that attacked her on the beach that night--and the jury believed her--even though Avery was able to produce a receipt that showed he had made a purchase in Green Bay just minutes after the time of the attack.  "A receipt doesn't prove anything!" said the prosecutor "Anyone could have bought something and given Steven Avery that receipt!".  Sixteen witnesses that testified that they thought they saw Avery in Green Bay at around that same time were also dismissed--because it was important to believe the victim.

The judge believed the victim too.  He sentenced Avery to 32-years in prison.  And two appeals courts believed the victim--upholding the convictions and the sentence.  A few years later, the Brown County Sheriff's Department let Manitowoc County deputies know that a jail inmate up there was confession to the attack along the beach.  But those who accused Avery and helped convict him rejected that tip--famously claiming "We've got the right guy in prison."

It wasn't until the intrepid attorneys with the Wisconsin Innocence Project got involved in the Avery case in the early 2000's that someone finally doubted the victim.  After years of legal challenges, they got DNA evidence testing done that proved Avery was not the attacker--and that the wrong man had been accused, tried and convicted.  Of course, by that time he had sat in prison for 18-years and there is really no way to provide "restorative justice" to him.

The existential question is "Did Steven Avery's accuser lie about him attacking her?"  When you stop to think about it, she truly believed that he is the one that assaulted her on the beach that night.  She was just wrong about who it really was.  And was Avery and his defenders wrong to deny those claims?  As history would eventually prove, they were not.  What I find interesting now is that the same celebrities and talking heads that decry Steven Avery's treatment by the justice system are the same ones who immediately called for Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be rejected as a Supreme Court Justice.

Of course, if everyone had continued to believe the beach assault victim, Steven Avery would just now be getting out of prison, Teresa Halbach would probably be a successful wedding photographer in the Green Bay area, and Brendan Dassey would still be playing video games and watching violent porn in his mother's mobile home.