Exonerated After 18 Years, Only To Be Imprisoned for Life

Steven Avery became the unlikely hero of a Netflix documentary.

Steven Allan Avery currently serves a life imprisonment sentence without the chance of parole in a correctional facility in Wisconsin.

He was convicted in 2007 and has spent 14 years in prison for the murder.

However, his total term spent in jail stands at about 32 years — 18 of which came from a wrongful conviction made in 1985. Around the time of his second arrest in 2007, he was the only one of the close to 200 exonerees of the Innocent Project to have been charged with a violent crime after their release.

However, the story isn’t as simple as it looks. What led to an innocent man going to jail for a crime he didn’t commit? And what drove him to actually commit murder after being released from almost two decades of imprisonment?

Or did he actually even commit the murder this time, or was he a victim of yet another wrongful conviction? Could one man be so unlucky? Let me go back to the original and proven wrongful conviction before we make any conclusions.

Who is Steven Avery?

Steven Avery was born in 1962 in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin and right from the start was never the brightest of kids.

He is reported to have a sub-par average IQ of as low as 70, and was considered to be barely functional at school, and also eventually dropped out of high school.

His first stint with crime came at an early age — when in March 1981, he was convicted of burgling a bar along with a friend, for which he was convicted and served 10 months of a 2-year sentence in prison.

A year later he was again imprisoned for animal cruelty, for having poured gasoline on his cat and tossing it into a bonfire.

In 1985, he forced his cousin Sandra Morris’s car off the road, and when she pulled over, he pointed a gun at her. This was because he wanted her to stop spreading alleged rumors about him for “exposing” himself or masturbating in public. This incident landed him a 6-year sentence, for which he was granted bail.

The Criminal Past and Then the Conviction

With such a notorious past, Avery was obviously always an easy suspect if there was something that went wrong.

In 1985, a woman named Penny Beernsten was brutally attacked and raped while jogging on a beach. When she described her attacker to the police, the police believed that the description matched that of Avery.

She was then shown an array of photos and among those photos, she identified Avery as her attacker.

Avery was arrested and charged with sexual assault and attempt to murder, and a trial began. Avery not only maintained his innocence throughout the trial he also had evidence to support him.

• 16 eyewitnesses testified that he was elsewhere at the time of the attack
• there was surveillance footage at a store that placed him 40 miles away timestamped right at the time of the attack

Yet, Avery, probably given his criminal background, was convicted of rape and attempted murder and sentenced to 32 years in prison.

The Exoneration, many years later…

It wasn’t until 2001 that there was a ray of hope for Avery, who all this while had spent 16 years in prison, for a crime he didn’t commit.

The Wisconsin Innocence Project got involved in Avery’s case and were able to secure a court order in 2002, to DNA test a hair strand found on the victim.

The DNA matched that of Gregory Allen, a sex offender who was currently in prison for a crime. Allen also admitted to the crime that happened in 1985 and after 18 years in prison, Avery was now a free man, exonerated of the charges he was convicted for.

Allen had been under police surveillance back in 1985 because of his criminal record towards women, but never became a suspect in the case back then and wasn’t included in the photo line-up. He, however, had a striking resemblance to Avery, and hence the misidentification by the victim.

Life As a Free Man, Not For Long

When Avery was released in 2003, his wife and his family had cut their ties with him. Avery had married a single mother back in 1982 and had four children together.

But the 18 years in prison, and his criminal background, had taken away not just his life but also his family.

Owing to the wrongful conviction that got a lot of media attention, a bill originally called the Avery Bill but later renamed the Criminal Justice Reform Bill was passed in October 2005 to prevent such cases of miscarriage of justice.

Avery also filed a $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County and a few of the officials involved in his conviction. However, he was in for another major episode with the judiciary — this time a conviction that would not be overturned.

The Teresa Halbach Murder

A photographer named Teresa Halbach disappeared on October 31, 2005. Her last known appointment was with Avery, to photograph his sister’s minivan that was going to be up for sale on an online website.

Halbach’s vehicle was recovered later from Avery’s salvage yard, and blood found in the interior of the vehicle happened to match the DNA of Avery.

Avery was linked to the murder and was charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder and was arrested on November 11, 2005. However, there were a series of controversial elements to the trial and the conviction.

The Apparent Facts of the Case & Incriminating Evidence

• Avery was charged with kidnapping, sexual assault, first-degree intentional homicide, mutilation of a corpse and possession of firearm by a felon
• The evidence against Avery was the blood found in the victim’s car that matched Avery’s as well as remains from bones found in the Avery salvage yard that matched the victim
• Avery pleaded not guilty to the charges and claimed that this was a setup by the County and officials to avoid the $36 million suit against them
• After the murder charges, the $36 million suit was settled for $400,000
• After a long trial, dozens of witnesses, and court proceedings, the jury finds Avery guilty of intentional homicide and possession of a firearm by a felon but acquit him of mutilation of a corpse
• Avery is sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of parole

The Questionable Elements and Defense Arguments

• One of the key incriminating pieces of evidence was the blood found in the car of the victim. Avery’s lawyers claimed that the blood was taken from a vial of Avery’s blood that was taken in 1996 during an appeal for the 1985 case.
• The charred bones and remains found in the burn pit at the salvage yard were supposedly not fit for DNA testing, and couldn’t be confirmed to be the victim’s. According to this article covering the incident,

The judge cites testimony by forensic anthropologist Dr. Leslie Eisenberg who said during trial that she was not able to conclude with scientific certainty that the fragments were human.

• Another key element of the conviction was Avery’s nephew Brendan Dassey, who was then 16 and confessed to helping his uncle in the murder. However, he later recanted his confession, saying he was coerced into making the confession.
• A dismissed juror from the trial told People.com that two of the jurors on the jury were related to county employees including the County Sheriff and hence had a conflict of interest in the case
• Another prisoner in Wisconsin admitted to having killed Teresa Halbach, but the authorities had doubts about the confession

With all of the above concerns and potential doubts, the result is that the case continues to see appeals and petitions from people that believe Avery is innocent of the murder.

Appeals, Petitions, and Media Coverage

There were numerous appeals made by the advocates in both cases — Avery and Dassey. Dassey’s lawyers even won an appeal but the ruling was later overturned by a higher court, stating that his confession was indeed constitutional.

However, huge media focus on the case returned with the release of the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer

that brought into question a lot of the elements of the trial and hinted towards a wrongful conviction. As IMDB describes the series,

Filmed over a 10-year period, Steven Avery, a DNA exoneree who, while in the midst of exposing corruption in local law enforcement, finds himself the prime suspect in a grisly new crime.

Following the docuseries, many petitions were filed to re-open the case and free Steven Avery — including a petition on Change.org with over 500,000 supporters, and another made on the White House website asking then-President Obama to pardon him, supported by 100,000 people.

Since January 2016, Chicago attorney Kathleen Zellner, in collaboration with the Midwest Innocence Project, has appealed on multiple grounds to re-open and investigate the case.

As of writing, the battle with the judicial system continues, and there is still hope for this case to be re-tried and for the world to know beyond doubt whether Steven Avery was indeed guilty, or a victim of yet another wrongful conviction.

References

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Steven-Avery https://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/story/news/2016/02/19/rapist-linked-avery-case-get-parole-hearing/80612368/ https://www.wiscnews.com/news/state-and-regional/steven-avery-case-read-the-original-reports/ https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/local/steven-avery/2016/01/28/steven-avery-case-timeline/79450680/ https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/8647223/steven-avery-police-chief-wife-gunpoint/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Avery https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2019/sep/27/making-a-murderer-confession-steven-avery-joseph-evans