Indefensible: The Missing Truth about Steven Avery, Teresa Halbach, and Making a Murderer - Hardcover

Griesbach, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1496710134 ISBN 13: 9781496710130

Publisher: Kensington, 2016

Synopsis

An insider exposes the shocking facts deliberately left out of the hit Netflix series Making a Murderer—and argues persuasively that Steven Avery was rightfully convicted in the 2005 killing of Teresa Halbach.
 
After serving eighteen years for a crime he didn’t commit, Steven Avery was freed—and filed a thirty-six-million-dollar lawsuit against Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. But before the suit could be settled, Avery was arrested again—this time for the brutal murder of Teresa Halbach—and, through the office of a special prosecutor, convicted once more.
 
When the saga exploded onto the public consciousness with the airing of Making a Murderer, Michael Griesbach, a prosecutor and member of Wisconsin’s Innocence Project who had been instrumental in Avery’s 2003 exoneration, was targeted on social media, threatened—and plagued by doubt. Now, in this suspenseful, thorough narrative, he recounts his own re-examination of the evidence in light of the whirlwind of controversy stirred up by the blockbuster true-crime series.
 
As Griesbach carefully reviews allegations of tampering and planted evidence, the confession by Avery’s developmentally disabled nephew, Brendan Dassey, and statements by Avery’s former girlfriend Jodi Stachowski, previously sealed documents deemed inadmissible at trial by Judge Patrick L. Willis—and a little-known, plausible alternate suspect—Griesbach shows how the filmmakers’ agenda, the accused man’s dramatic backstory, and sensational media coverage have clouded the truth about Steven Avery.
 
Now as Avery’s defense counsel files an appeal and prepares to do battle in the courtroom once more, Griesbach fights to set the record straight, determined that evidence should be followed where it leads and justice should be served—for as surely as our legal system should not send an innocent man to prison, neither should it let a guilty man walk free.
 
Includes 16 pages of photos

About this title

About the Author

Michael Griesbach is a longtime Wisconsin prosecutor and a member of the board of advisers at the Wisconsin Innocence Project. He is a frequent presenter and panelist on the topic of wrongful convictions and their causes. He has also presented on other topics concerning the criminal justice system and its need for reform. Mr. Griesbach is the author of the widely acclaimed, The Innocent Killer: A True Story of a Wrongful Conviction and Its Astonishing Aftermath, published by the American Bar Association in 2014. He hopes to leave his readers better informed about the criminal justice system and more concerned about those whose lives it deeply affects. He lives in northeastern Wisconsin with his wife Jody and their four children.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The trouble began almost immediately after the documentary aired. It started with social media; the bomb threats came later. “You’re an utter fool,” pronounced the first message on my book’s Facebook page, “either that or you’re in on it too.” 

“Utter fool,” I could live with. Everyone’s an utter fool at some point in their life, some of us more often than others. But “in on it too”?

The documentary that had so upset my former Facebook friend had just been released on Netflix, but was soon to be an international smash hit—Making a Murderer, about the Steven Avery case. 

Mr. Avery, of course, is the wrongly convicted Wisconsin man who, two years after his release from prison for a crime he did not commit, perpetrated one of the most horrific murders in the history of Wisconsin, a state with a long and ignominious past of horrific murders.

At least that’s what the majority of Wisconsinites and the few who paid attention to the story outside our borders thought before Making a Murderer turned the case upside down.
What was it about Making a Murderer that so firmly convinced people that lightning had struck twice, that Steven Avery had been wrongly convicted a second time? And why were they so mad?

There was only one way to find out . . .

Edition details

• Publisher: Kensington
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 1496710134
• ISBN 13: 9781496710130
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304