See ‘Making a Murderer’ Lawyer Talk Evidence, Prosecutor’s ‘Sour Grapes’
Since the true-crime docu-series Making a Murderer debuted on Netflix in December, the former Wisconsin district attorney Ken Kratz, who secured a murder conviction for Steven Avery, has accused the program of not showing all of the damning evidence presented in trial. One of his chief complaints was that the filmmakers did not include the discovery of Avery’s DNA under the hood of victim Teresa Halbach’s RAV4.
“For Kratz to say that that somehow was the strongest piece of the case, it was not that important at trial and for whatever reason the filmmakers have to make decisions about what they would cover and what they couldn’t,” attorney Jerry Buting, one of two defense lawyers for Avery, tells Rolling Stone. “At this point, it’s sour grapes for Mr. Kratz, frankly, to go around and say this film doesn’t cover so much of their case. The vast majority of the state’s case was presented.”
Buting also explained why he felt the DNA found was unimportant. “It wasn’t sweat DNA,” he says. “There’s no such thing as ‘sweat DNA.’ Their own expert, from the crime lab, testified that they never did a presumptive test on that hood latch to see if there was blood there. And she said, ‘I can’t foreclose the possibility that it was blood from which the DNA came.’ It was a discolored swab.”
Moroever, he said that the amount of DNA found on the hood latch was so small that it might have been inadvertently transferred by an investigator working in the car. One of the forensics specialists working on blood-splatter analysis, he said, had said he’d opened the hood of the vehicle to get the odometer reading but did not take off his gloves. “Whatever DNA was found in there might have been innocently transferred by the analyst himself,” Buting says.