The making of “The Making of a Murderer”

The New Neo Posted on by

I haven’t seen the Netflix series “The Making of a Murderer,” and I probably won’t—too time-consuming. But I’m familiar with a lot of criminal cases where the convicted person has been exonerated, including cases in which eyewitness testimony turns out to have been wrong (see this for a discussion of the problems with eyewitness testimony).

“The Making of a Murderer” is a documentary which has caused scads of people to feel so strongly that convicted murderer Steven Avery was railroaded by local Wisconsin law enforcement and the justice system when he was tried for the 2005 murder of photographer Teresa Halbach and found guilty that they’ve started a huge petition for his pardon:

The documentary, and Avery’s defense team, suggested that law enforcement officials in Manitowoc County planted evidence against Avery after he filed a $36 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the county over his 1985 conviction. The current sheriff of Manitowoc County has rejected those claims.

Avery’s original 1985 rape conviction (not the 2005 murder conviction) was a case of mistaken eyewitness testimony, and he was exonerated by later DNA tests. This is similar to the way in which quite a few other convicts have been cleared now that DNA testing has been perfected, a review that was sparked by the Innocence Project. But prior to that mistaken conviction (and by the way, the actual perpetrator turns out to have physically resembled Avery), Avery had been a criminal and had engaged in animal torture and burning:

At age 18, Avery pleaded guilty to burglary of a bar and was sentenced to 10 months in prison. When he was 20, Avery and another man pleaded guilty to animal cruelty after pouring gasoline and oil on Avery’s cat and throwing it, alive, into a fire; Avery was again sentenced to prison. In 1985, Avery was charged with assaulting his cousin, the wife of a part-time Manitowoc County sheriff’s deputy, and possessing a firearm as a felon. The same year, he was also convicted of raping a Manitowoc woman, Penny Beerntsen, of which he was later proven innocent. He served six years for assaulting his cousin and illegally possessing firearms, and 18 years for the assault, sexual assault, and attempted rape he did not commit.

And that’s not all; there are also these additional allegations [from a 2006 article]:

The collective allegations of depravity are numbing, even when he was incarcerated. In recent court filings arguing for changes in bail, investigators alleged that early in his incarceration he threatened to kill and mutilate his own wife. They also contend he told another inmate at some point that he had drawn up plans for a “torture chamber” for kidnapping, raping and killing women.

Nevertheless, part of the 18 year sentence was indeed for a rape he didn’t commit. And we know that law enforcement can and sometimes does act in unethical ways in order to get someone.

However, from everything I’ve read about this case (and subsequent to the controversy, I have read a good deal), Avery in fact committed this murder. The evidence is, quite simply, overwhelming. The “Making of a Murderer” documentary, moreover, does not present all of it. And yet millions of people have become convinced by the documentary of Avery’s innocence, without knowing (or perhaps caring?) that they’ve been getting a skewed picture.

Propaganda works. And that’s what this is.

[NOTE: If you want to read some in-depth articles about the problems with the documentary, please see this, this, this, and this, among others.

In addition:

The show includes comments from an excused juror in Avery’s case suggesting his conviction was based on flawed evidence.

But Diane Free, a juror who was present to the end, told The Associated Press by phone that she was “comfortable with the verdict we reached. The thing on Netflix was a movie, not a documentary.”…

…In an email to TheWrap on Monday, [prosecutor] Kratz [says] the documentary series got it wrong.

The email concludes with Kratz saying Netflix should “either provide an opportunity for rebuttal, or alert the viewers that this series was produced by and FOR the defense of Steven Avery, and contains only the opinion and theory of the defense team.”

Kratz’s email is presented in its entirety at the link, and it’s well worth reading.]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s another good analysis of the flaws in the conspiracy theories.]

Some of the candidates “not sure” whether Ted Cruz is a natural-born citizen

The New Neo Posted on by

Fancy that; nice of them to be so concerned.

Here’s Trump—only for Ted’s own good, of course:

Donald Trump wants Ted Cruz to go before a judge to “immediately, like tomorrow” to determine whether or not he is a “natural born citizen” and therefore eligible to run for president.

Trump made the request for Cruz to seek a declaratory judgment from federal court on the issue during an interview with CNN on Wednesday.

Trump cast such a move as “for the good of Ted.”

And I have little doubt that this snarky comment of Rand Paul has endeared him further to the 100 or so people who still support him:

Rand Paul said on Wednesday that he’s not sure if his Canadian-born rival for the Republican presidential nomination Ted Cruz is eligible to be president of the United States.

“You know, I think without question he is qualified and would make the cut to be prime minister of Canada, absolutely without question, he is qualified and he meets the qualifications,” the Kentucky senator said of Cruz on the radio show Kilmeade and Friends.

Curiously enough, back in 2013 Paul thought differently:

“You won’t find me questioning his eligibility. I decided a long time ago I wouldn’t be a birther. I’m not a birther for Democrats. I’m not a birther for Republicans. I’m staying out of that.”

And maybe John McCain wants to get into the act and run for president again now that Lindsay Graham is out, because McCain’s wondering about Cruz, too.

If you want the legal scoop, go to Andrew C. McCarthy.

Some un-PC events in Cologne

The New Neo Posted on by

The Guardian is a leftist British paper, and so I was surprised to see its straightforward report on mobs of “men largely of Arab and north African appearance” attacking women in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve:

German police are investigating reports that scores of women were sexually assaulted and mugged in Cologne city centre during New Year’s Eve celebrations, in what a minister called a “completely new dimension of crime”.

Authorities and media were accused of a cover-up linked to initial indications that, according to the police, those allegedly responsible for the sex attacks and numerous robberies were of Arab and north African origin.

Sixty complaints were filed to police, a third of which were linked to sexual assault. Cologne’s mayor, Henriette Reker, called an emergency meeting of high-ranking security officials on Tuesday, saying her aim was to ensure the city centre did not turn into a “lawless zone”.

Between 500 and 1,000 men described as drunk and aggressive are believed to have been behind the attacks on partygoers in the centre of the western German city. Whether they were working as a single group or in separate gangs remains unclear.

Women reported being tightly surrounded by groups of men who harassed and mugged them. Some people threw fireworks into the crowds, adding to the chaos.

“Sexual crimes took place on a huge scale,” said the police president, Wolfgang Albers. “The crimes were committed by a group of people who from appearance were largely from the north African or Arab world.”

To me, the attacks themselves are far less surprising than the fact that a paper like the Guardian isn’t pulling its punches. In fact, the actual events are not surprising at all. The minister may call the attacks “a completely new dimension of crime,” but that only reflects the minister’s ignorance of the Lara Logan story at the hands of a mob in Egypt.

And the behavior in Germany was not limited to Cologne, either:

Similar attacks are believed to have taken place on a smaller scale in Hamburg’s red light district of St Pauli on New Year’s Eve, according to a police spokesman.

The Guardian is careful to point out that:

Critics of Merkel’s open-door policy on refugees were quick to blame it for the attacks, despite the police’s insistence that the alleged perpetrators were not new arrivals.

How would they know the perpetrators were not new arrivals, since they haven’t figured out exactly who they were yet? Was it, perhaps, because they spoke fluent German, or even unaccented German? And even if that were the case (I don’t know if it was or wasn’t), how on earth would that fact support the idea that taking in more refugees from that general area of the world will be perfectly okay? In fact, it would tend to argue against it, because if years of residence or even local birth and supposed assimilation to German culture did not discourage this sort of behavior, why wouldn’t a person expect that it would be even worse with newer arrivals, who have had less exposure to modern Western ways?

But this article also said some of the perpetrators didn’t speak German, and that some of the women (it’s not clear how many) were robbed of wallets and/or cellphones. Furthermore, this report in the Telegraph, allegedly leaked from the police, says that some of the attackers were indeed recent arrivals, and rather bold ones at that:

But the leaked police report, published in Bild newspaper and Spiegel, a news magazine, claims that one of those involved told officers: “I am Syrian. You have to treat me kindly. Mrs Merkel invited me.”

Another tore up his residence permit before the eyes of police, and told them: “You can’t do anything to me, I can get a new one tomorrow.”

A local newspaper reported that fifteen asylum-seekers from Syria and Afghanistan were briefly held by police on New Year’s Eve in connection with the sex attacks but were released.

I don’t really know how the actual perpetrators can be identified, anyway; I suppose it would depend on how good the surveillance video is. Perhaps the women also remember a few of the more prominent faces, but it would be hard to make an identification without other evidence, and I’m not at all sure that authorities are motivated to do so. Instead, the mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, has issued some guidelines for German women’s behavior in the future:

The crisis management team said prevention measures should include a code of conduct for young women and girls, and Mayor Reker said the existing code of conduct will be updated online.

The suggested code of conduct includes maintaining an arm’s length distance from strangers, to stick within your own group, to ask bystanders for help or to intervene as a witness, or to inform the police if you are the victim of such an assault.

She’s been heavily criticized for this, as one might expect. Of course, asking bystanders for help or informing police if you are attacked is mere common sense, but the rest of the directives are not how German women are used to being told to act. However, when a country takes in a large group of people (particularly young men) who believe that women walking around freely makes them fair game, then this is what that country will get, and that country will have to deal with the fallout.

Perhaps the issuance of a bunch of chadors to the women of Germany would do the trick. The institution of the religious police might also be in Germany’s future:

They have the power to arrest unrelated males and females caught socializing, anyone engaged in homosexual behavior or prostitution; to enforce Islamic dress-codes, and store closures during the prayer time. They enforce Muslim dietary laws, prohibit the consumption or sale of alcoholic beverages and pork, and seize banned consumer products and media regarded as anti-Islamic (such as CDs/DVDs of various Western musical groups, television shows and film which has material contrary to Sharia law or Islam itself).

If a large enough group of refugees and/or immigrants arrives in a country without admiring the culture and customs of their new home and without wanting to become part of it except in the sense of personal financial gain, then that country is at risk of having its own culture and customs undermined. It’s not bigotry to recognize that, it’s simple logic, and although people give it the name “xenophobia” it is not a “phobia” at all. Phobias are disproportionate and irrational. A concern about what is going on in Europe (and in this country) if those conditions persist, and where it all is going to end, is (unfortunately) quite rational.

North Korea claims to have tested a hydrogen bomb

The New Neo Posted on by

Maybe yes, maybe no; North Korea’s claims of testing an H-bomb are doubted, but might be true.

“We have consistently made clear that we will not accept [North Korea] as a nuclear state,” said a spokesman for the National Security Council. “We will continue to protect and defend our allies in the region, including the Republic of Korea, and will respond appropriately to any and all North Korean provocations.”.

Blah, blah, blah. The truth is that we have accepted North Korea as a nuclear state:

There is currently no diplomacy from the U.S. to restrain the nuclear development, so this test “also puts the U.S. on the spot.”…

The fact that the test has taken place, assuming it was successful, complicates the situation in Northeast Asia,” [Mike Chinoy of the U.S.-China Institute at USC] said. “Beijing had been becoming more friendly.”

Being more warm and cordial was hoped to restrain North Korea but now this places the Chinese authorities in a big dilemma.

I would say that many of the world’s nations have been in “a big dilemma” about North Korea and its nuclear program for several decades.

“If [fill in the blank] becomes the Republican nominee…”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m choosing to discuss this comment by “mollyNH.” But really, that’s an arbitrary selection on my part. You’ll see why in a moment:

If Cruz were to be the nominee the MSM will shred him apart because of his Christian fundamentalism…The media will just dust off what they used for Romney & Santorum & replace Mormon & Catholic with So Baptist.

Indeed. But I’d go further and add that a sentence that takes the form “If [fill in the blank] becomes the Republican nominee, the MSM will shred him/her because of [fill in the blank]…” can be used for any Republican. One thing you can bank on is that the eventual Republican nominee will be under rhetorical attack from the mainstream media, and the eventual Democratic nominee will be under an umbrella of protection.

However, the form these things will take varies, because although all possible nominees will be under attack, the content will differ.

If a candidate is seen as especially threatening to the Democrats, he or she is more likely to be met with an attempt to take him/her down early, in order to try to avoid that person getting the nomination in the first place. That sort of early attack is not geared primarily to repel Democrats or moderates, either, because the people who vote in Republican primaries and choose the nominee of the GOP are primarily (pun intended) Republicans, although in some states others can cross over.

The MSM sometimes doesn’t even have to enter that fray, because other Republican candidates will often supply the ammunition and lead the charge. But sometimes the MSM tries to undermine a Republican candidate during the primaries; for example, the charges against Herman Cain in 2011, and this season’s lame attempt to discredit Rubio because of ownership of a boat.

But at the moment the MSM is relying mostly on the Republicans to attack each other, and the Republicans are mostly obliging. However, you can be certain that the MSM is holding back information on every single one of the Republican candidates in order to use that knowledge when it can do the most damage, which is after the nomination.

The real question is not whether they have such information on each, but what form it will take, how damaging it will be, and what segment of the public will be listening.

Just to illustrate what I’m getting at here: what dirt does the MSM have on Rubio? Tales of debt and boats and traffic tickets don’t really seem to matter to many people. The thing that hurts Rubio the most is his voting record on illegal immigration, but that is already pretty well-known to those who would find it to be a major drawback: conservatives, more than independents or Democrats. So I’m not sure that further revelations about the Gang of 8 would hurt Rubio any more than he’s already been hurt.

What of the rest? We can pretty much assume that Cruz will be excoriated as an extremist, both religious and otherwise. That would hurt him with moderates (and the religiosity might hurt him with some libertarians) and help him with conservatives. I’m not sure what the net result would be. For Fiorina it’s easy: more Hewlett-Packard. Christie? They already tried with Bridgegate, so that damage has been done. I’m not sure what else they would find (the hug is old, old news); perhaps there isn’t all that much more.

Trump, of course, is a very special case. There are a great many negatives that can be pulled out and emphasized or in some cases re-emphasized; you can find some of them here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. As you can see, it’s a lengthy list.

But will it matter? One thing of which I’m fairly sure is that it won’t matter to the hard-core Trump enthusiasts—who at the moment seem to account for something like one-third of the Republican Party, which makes them less than one-sixth of the American public, and perhaps slightly more than that of the voting public. I have no idea about the remaining majority of voters, but my guess is that those who are negative about Trump will become more so, and those who are ambivalent or lukewarm won’t find that the stories enhance his appeal. But that’s only a hunch of mine—and with Trump, what I really believe is that no one can predict what will happen, neither his followers nor his opponents.

The only truly predictable thing is what I said earlier: the MSM will do what it can to bring the Republican down, it will save some of its ammunition for after the nomination, and it will do its level best to protect the Democrat.

Obama’s executive order on gun control

The New Neo Posted on by

As promised (or threatened, depending on your point of view), Obama has issued an executive order to go around Congress on gun control. He starts by listing types of gun violence and numbers of victims (including suicides) and then goes on to harangue Congress for not passing unspecified “commonsense gun safety reforms supported by a majority of the American people.”

Some of his orders involve making the already-existing gun check procedures more efficient; for example, having them function 24 hours a day, seven days a week, which involves hiring more people. This actually seems like the sort of change that would be appropriate for an executive order: enforce existing laws.

It’s several later orders that appear to go beyond existing law that have caused the objections, although to greater or lesser degrees depending on who is doing the writing. For example, Charles C. W. Cooke in National Review thinks it’s not really such a big deal:

Even if we’re generous and presume that every single one of these regulations finds its way permanently into the law, he will nevertheless have done nothing substantial to further “universal background checks”; he will have instituted none of his coveted magazine limits; and he will have banned none of the weapons that he disdains. Further, he will have set no meaningful precedents whatsoever. In other words: Even if he wins this round, he will have done precisely nothing of merit ”” except perhaps to have pleased his base and to have convinced the most ignorant parts of the electorate that he has finally stuck his finger into the NRA’s eye. Were these serious measures, I would be squealing. Instead, I’m amused.

Well, I’m not so very amused as Cooke. I think Cooke fails to appreciate that pleasing Obama’s base and sticking his finger in the NRA’s eye are no small parts of Obama’s goal, and not unimportant to Obama, although Cooke might not think that much of them. What’s more, who said Obama is finished? Did someone take his phone and pen away? If so, I hadn’t noticed. Obama puts his toe in the water, tests things out, and then immerses his foot, and so on.

But it’s also the process in general that Obama wants advanced—that is, his right to do things without Congress. That’s something that Caleb Howe at Red State recognizes. His post explains what each “loophole” or supposed loophole is, and what effect the executive orders are likely to have on them. He agrees with Cooke that the effects are probably rather small. However:

Although the practical effect of the President’s action is relatively minor, it is a message nevertheless. The President is establishing his authority to simply take action curtailing the constitutionally guaranteed right of Americans to own guns, without the legislature, based on his own decisions about what that action should consist of.

This president is always establishing a precedent. He would do much more if he thought he could get away with it.

[ADDENDUM: In Obama’s speech he made a statement that he’s made many times before in different ways:

“We are the only advanced country on Earth that sees this kind of mass violence erupt with this kind of frequency,” Obama said. “It doesn’t happen in other advanced countries. It’s not even close.”

It all depends on your definition of “advanced countries.” The statistics to which Obama is referring carefully pick and choose the countries for comparison to the US in order to prove the point. But is Russia, for example, an “advanced country”? You certainly can argue that it’s not a country you’d want to live in, but I can’t see that it’s not advanced. It has a very high murder rate, and is often left out of the list. If you want to look at an article about how these statistics are cherry-picked, take a look at this, complete with several charts. It makes for very interesting reading.

For example:

Why not use the UN’s human development index instead? That would seem to make at least as much sense if we’re devoted to looking at “developed countries.”

So, let’s do that. Here we see that the OECD’s list contains Turkey, Bulgaria, Mexico, and Chile. So, if we’re honest with ourselves, that must mean that other countries with similar human development rankings are also suitable for comparisons to the US.

Well, Turkey and Mexico have HDI numbers at .75. So, let’s include other countries with HDI numbers either similar or higher. That means we should include The Bahamas, Argentina, Costa Rica, Cuba, Panama, Uruguay, Venezuela, Russia, Lithuania, Belarus, Estonia, and Latvia.

You can see where this is going. If we include countries that have HDI numbers similar to ”” or at least as high as ”” OECD members Turkey and Mexico, we find that the picture for the United States murder rate looks very different (correctly using murder rates and not gun-deaths rates…)

And why not include data from individual states? It has always been extremely imprecise and lazy to talk about the “US murder rate.” The US is an immense country with a lot of variety in laws and demographics. (Mexico deserves the same analysis, by the way.) Many states have murder rates that place them on the short list of low-crime places in the world. Why do we conveniently ignore them? The US murder rate is being driven up by a few high-murder states such as Maryland, Louisiana, South Carolina, Delaware, and Tennessee. In the spirit of selective use of data, let’s just leave those states out of it, and look at some of the low-crime ones…

It’s a very interesting article, and I suggest you read the whole thing. There are also some statistics here that specifically involve gun deaths (but include suicides, accidents, and justifiable homicides) rather than all homicides. You’ll note that almost everywhere in Latin America, including a “developed” country such as Uruguay, the gun death rate is high. And in South Africa (a country with a split personality, because it’s both developed and developing) it’s astronomical.

I couldn’t locate a transcript of Obama’s speech, but if he meant to refer to mass murders only, I’ve already written a piece about that.]

Cornhead reports on Ted Cruz in Iowa

The New Neo Posted on by

And approves:

For those readers who think Senator Cruz suffers from a charisma deficit, please be advised that he rocked the house last night. If Senator Cruz were the point guard running the team in a tight basketball game, he would have been knocking down threes and passing the ball with skill. Offense, not defense.

And here’s the NY Times with a brief report on the same event. Eggs over easy.

Saudi Arabia…

The New Neo Posted on by

…seems to be in big trouble.

The country has been a walking contradiction for a long time:

Last week’s mass executions in Saudi Arabia suggest panic at the highest level of the monarchy. The action is without precedent, even by the grim standards of Saudi repression. In 1980 Riyadh killed 63 jihadists who had attacked the Grand Mosque of Mecca, but that was fresh after the event. Most of the 47 prisoners shot and beheaded on Jan. 2 had sat in Saudi jails for a decade. The decision to kill the prominent Shia cleric Nimr al-Nimr, the most prominent spokesman for restive Saudi Shia Muslims in Eastern Province, betrays fear of subversion with Iranian sponsorship…

…Saudi Arabia finds itself isolated, abandoned by its longstanding American ally, at odds with China, and pressured by Russia’s sudden preeminence in the region. The Saudi-backed Army of Conquest in Syria seems to be crumbling under Russian attack. The Saudi intervention in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi rebels has gone poorly. And its Turkish ally-of-convenience is consumed by a low-level civil war. Nothing has gone right for Riyadh.

Worst of all, the collapse of Saudi oil revenues threatens to exhaust the kingdom’s $700 billion in financial reserves within five years…

For decades, Riyadh has presented itself as an ally of the West and a force for stability in the region, while providing financial support for Wahhabi fundamentalism around the world. China has been the kingdom’s largest customer as well as a provider of sophisticated weapons, including surface-to-surface missiles. But China also has lost patience with the monarchy’s support for Wahhabi Islamists in China and bordering countries.

Good news, bad news—which is it?