Wisconsin: Something Evil Has Been Happening There For Decades: Michael Klaeser

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Monday, February 15, 2016

A Month Before Steven Avery Was Framed for the Murder, He Expressed His Fear of the Police

Man wrongly imprisoned is still adjusting to freedom

By Tom Sheehan, The Journal Times, Racine, WI
October 3, 2005

When Steven Avery recently heard his name broadcast over the police scanner, he turned off the lights and hid inside his trailer home.

Avery has reason to fear police - not because he's wanted, but because he spent 18 years on prison for a crime he didn't commit.

Avery had nothing to worry about, but his mother, Delores, and his brother, Chuck, had to assure the 43-year-old Two Rivers man he wasn't in trouble. A police dispatcher mentioned his name while describing the location of nearby property where suspicious activity occurred.

Avery listens to the scanner as part of his job with Avery's Auto Salvage, where he drives the tow truck and prepares cars for storage by draining oil and removing gas tanks. The work at the company, started by his father and owned by his brothers, keeps his mind occupied so he doesn't dwell too long on the life that's been robbed from him.

"When I'm working like eight hours a day, I don't think about nothin'," Avery said.

Since being released from prison two years ago, thanks to DNA evidence and the Wisconsin Innocence Project, Avery has enjoyed some of his newfound freedom. He especially enjoys going for drives in his 2002 Ford F-350 pickup truck or his '93 Grand Am.

But when he has time to reflect on what happened, emotions build up. He'll never know if he could have kept his marriage together or what kind of father he would have been to five children if he weren't behind bars. Maybe some of the arguments he had with his ex-wife wouldn't have happened. Maybe he'd be running the family business.

"Mostly when I'm by myself, sometimes it hits me - all what I went through. I'll be driving down the road and that, and I have to pull over. I break up in tears and everything else," Avery said.

Avery admits having trouble adjusting to life "on the outside." He moved in and out of the homes of relatives before he settling in the borrowed trailer. He remains in touch with just one of his five children, he said.

He also has had a run-in with the law since being released. In March, he pleaded no contest and paid a $243 penalty for a municipal disorderly conduct citation for being "involved in an altercation," according to the Manitowoc County Clerk of Courts office.

Some of the difficulties may explain why Avery doesn't exude the sense of relief you might expect to see from someone recently released from prison. On the other hand, he also doesn't readily convey a sense of bottled rage you might expect from a man wrongly imprisoned.

Avery is approachable, conversational and soft-spoken, especially for someone who's been hounded by media attention. His face has been plastered all over newspapers and television news makes him an easy target for chat in the Two Rivers area. He doesn't mind, but his mother has gotten to the point she no longer wants to go to grocery shop with him because so many people want to stop and talk, Avery said. Prisoners who insist they are innocent also call for help, and sometimes he believes them.

Avery said he hopes a bill that passed the Assembly last week will help prevent wrongful convictions. Among other things, it would revise the way suspects are identified in police lineups.

"I think they're starting to realize what really went wrong. Before, they didn't think this could happen," Avery said of police in his case.

Avery said he doesn't hold a grudge against the sexual assault victim who wrongly fingered him as the suspect. But he's not ready to forgive and forget law enforcement and court officials, who failed to thoroughly investigate his case, he said.

He's convinced police still do sloppy work on some investigations. As evidence, Avery offers that his fiance was wrongly convicted of drunken driving - a fourth offense. Avery said he knows she's innocent because he was driving her car when it went into a ditch on a foggy day in May 2004.

Avery said she's is in jail because police found mud on her clothes, suggesting she got out of the driver's door. Avery said she got mud on her when she climbed out of the driver's side. He claims police never even interviewed him about the incident, which he said occurred the day he met the woman. She was working at a gas station when Avery asked her if she wanted to go for a ride.

Sounds a bit hard to believe, but Avery's been doubted before.

Tom Sheehan can be reached at tsheehanmadison.com or (608) 252-6198.

Never seen this discussed
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Quotes

"The most common way for forensic evidence to be planted is by re-labeling the forensic swabs." - Dr. Karl Reich, PhD

A former New York City narcotics detective testified in court that planting drugs on innocent people was common practice, a quick and easy way to boost arrest numbers. Stephen Anderson, the former detective, is now cooperating with prosecutors and is spilling the beans on the crooked practice of framings and false arrests, often to reach arrest quotas. “It was something I was seeing a lot of, whether it was from supervisors or undercovers and even investigators,” Anderson testified in Brooklyn Supreme Court. “It’s almost like you have no emotion with it, that they attach the bodies to it, they’re going to be out of jail tomorrow anyway; nothing is going to happen to them anyway.” The Drug Policy Alliance, a group that promotes alternatives to the war on drugs, issued a statement calling the case against the officers indicative of larger, systematic failures. “One of the consequences of the war on drugs is that police officers are pressured to make large numbers of arrests, and it’s easy for some of the less honest cops to plant evidence on innocent people. The drug war inevitably leads to crooked policing — and quotas further incentivize such practices.” - Huffington Post, October 13, 2011

A crucial aspect of Zellner’s effort to overturn Ryan Ferguson's conviction was obtaining two recantations from key witnesses whose testimony placed Ferguson at the crime scene. They admitted to lying after being pressured by police and prosecutors. Zellner has become a standard bearer among civil rights attorneys and has long been known as a fierce courtroom advocate — armed with a recorder-like memory, trial techniques that include videotaped re-enactments of crime scenes and, perhaps most crucially for her clients, an ability to elicit the truth from co-defendants or witnesses who have previously lied about innocent defendants’ involvement in crimes in order to save themselves. Quite simply, she gets people to talk. And to tell the truth. - Chicago Lawyer Magazine, December 2014

“What drives me is the abuse of power—the bullying and the victim. I have such a strong reaction when I see people who can’t defend themselves... When I watched the Avery case, I felt that the attitude toward him by the prosecutors and the state was that he was disposable. It was almost like a class thing. [His family] didn’t matter, they had no power. The longer I watched it, the more angry I got.” - Kathleen Zellner, Newsweek, April 8, 2016

“We are continuing to examine every aspect of Mr. Avery’s case and all of his legal options. We are confident Mr. Avery’s conviction will be vacated when we present the new evidence and results of our work to the appropriate court.” - Kathleen Zellner, The Wrap, January 11, 2016

“There is evidence that already exists in the case that points to a different location and a different suspect. We've got a combination of forensic evidence and a tip from somebody that we've interviewed multiple times that we think is credible... I've never seen a more graphic, compelling illustration of a crime scene that was fabricated.” - Kathleen Zellner, The New York Times, August 18, 2016

During a press conference on August 26, 2016, Kathleen Zeller said: “[In the post-conviction petition] we're going to lay out all of our investigation that we have done that will point to a third party. That was not successfully done at the trial level. I think the most reassuring thing is that we are going to get to the bottom of who killed Teresa Halbach... we're not going to disclose that until we do the post-conviction petition. But I can tell you that the testing we've already done will establish Mr. Avery's innocence. But we are going to do the whole thing; we're going to do every conceivable test. We've been contacted by scientists all over the world, volunteering, offering us ideas. And now we've got it pinned down to the testing we need to do to determine once and for all: was the evidence in the vehicle planted, was the DNA on the bullet planted, was the car key planted, was the DNA on the car key planted? We're going to be able to answer all of those questions because it's been almost 10 years since the verdict and there have been really huge developments in forensic science... Because he [Avery] never made any incriminating statements. The [Dassey] confession has been invalidated. So you're down to the evidence at the crime scene. You're down to the key, the hood latch, the blood in the RAV and the bullet.” When asked, “Do you just have one suspect in mind or are you looking at multiple suspects?,” Zellner replied, “In fairness, yeah, we are looking at multiple people, but we are narrowing it down.” And when asked, “What can you tell us about the suspect?,” she answered: “Nothing. Nothing. Not until I file [the post-conviction petition].”

“Not 1 but 8 plants: bullets, bones, blood, camera, cellphone PDA, key, car + false confession. World's best experts on it. #MakingAMurderer” - Kathleen Zellner, Twitter, January 17, 2017

“There’s always an element of misconduct. Police, prosecutors—They’re actually able to sleep at night knowing they’ve convicted an innocent man. They rationalize it. They say ‘I didn’t convict him, the jury did!’” - Paul Henderson, Private Investigator, May 7, 2013

"My biggest problem with police interrogations is they don't believe anything you say. So right out of the gate everyone is a liar as far as they are concerned. They are pretty much trained to be cynical of society and given power over them at the same time. They claim you are lying, while they themselves lie. To them, the end justifies the means when you’re a police officer protecting the citizenry from the scum of the city." - Reddit

“I think people become jaded when they spend too much time as a prosecutor, or if they first come to be a prosecutor after being a victim of some kind. They start seeing all of the accused as a subclass of humanity that doesn't deserve due process. Then they start watching Nancy Grace, and hanging around with the like minded, until their journey is complete. Unfortunately it is within human nature to descend down these paths to prejudice, to form self congratulating, witch burning mobs, and to rationalize the injustices they cause by dehumanizing their victims.” - magilla39, Reddit, October 11, 2017

"She’s not intimidated by anybody. In particular, she doesn’t have much respect for authority. She has a willingness to challenge and be skeptical of authority. And she has a real compassion for the underdog. Most of the people in prison are dangerous, violent criminals who belong there—she knows that. She’s not starry-eyed about criminals. But she’s not starry-eyed about people in authority, either." - Robert Zellner, January 2018

U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions rededicated his department to working with local law enforcement on civil asset forfeiture efforts that bypass the need for criminal convictions to seize property—and also bypass state and local safeguards. Forfeited funds are split between federal and local agencies in a lucrative arrangement for everybody but the victims. "Equitable sharing" collaboration between federal and local agencies was suspended under former Attorney General Eric Holder, but the new regime is jump-starting the program. Yes, Sessions promised that "the federal government will not adopt seized property unless the state or local agency involved provides information demonstrating that the seizure was justified by probable cause." But that's cold comfort if the probable cause comes from eager cops planting bags of drugs hither and yon. The evidence—not planted—suggests that police officers don't need more incentive to falsify reasons for slapping on the cuffs. Day-to-day pressures to meet arrest quotas, out-do colleagues, or spackle over errors in judgment seem to have already done the job in spades. - J.D. Tuccille, July 24, 2017

'If I was able to spoon feed an audience for 10 hours facts that I could pick and choose, edit or even create from other clips I could get an audience to believe whatever I wanted them to believe." - Ken Kratz, Daily Mail, February 13, 2017

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