Steven Avery Attorney: 'Huge Amount of New Evidence' Coming in Making a Murderer Case

Liberty Leading the People, by Eugene Delacroix (1830).

Liberty Rights of Innocent Falling in the Regressive State

Updated - MADISON, WIS — As public faith in the Wisconsin and federal criminal justice systems remains low, the attorney for the once-exonerated Steven Avery will file a new legal petition containing a "huge amount of new evidence," an announcement reads today.

Just in case any of you are wondering we are working as hard as ever on Steven Avery’s case. We will be filing a new petition with a huge amount of new evidence. We will never give up pounding on the doors of justice for him.

@MakingAMurderer #TruthWins

— Kathleen Zellner (@ZellnerLaw) January 11, 2022

The case is State of Wisconsin v Steven Avery, featured in the Emmy-winning Making a Murderer docuseries.

Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, were convicted of first-degree homicide for the 2005 murder of a young photographer, Teresa Halbach. Both men are serving life sentences.

The coming Avery-Zellner filing follows a Nov 2021 defeat at the Wisconsin Supreme Court that refused to hear a petition, in accordance with the Wisconsin Judiciary's abdication of its role as guardians of civil liberties and defendant rights.

Most see the Avery-Dassey saga as revenge prosecutions in Manitowoc and Calumet counties, an insular region of the state known for small-town justice — injustice.

Steven Avery's real crime was to be exonerated for a 1985 wrongful conviction, and then file a federal civil rights action against Manitowoc County, known locally as "corruption county." 

The State of Wisconsin needed corroboration of allegations in its frame-up against Avery in 2003, so in a grotesque action in 2005-06, threw an innocent 16-year-old Dassey into legal fires, with no consideration given to the fact Brendan Dassey was demonstrably innocent.

Now, the Avery and Dassey cases have become partisan lightening rods as leading Wisconsin Democratic Party officeholders, including Gov. Tony Evers (D) and Attorney General Joshua Kaul (D), have worked to block evidentiary hearings the publicly challenge rampant law enforcement misconduct

In a legal spectacle in the Spring 2021, Thomas Sowinski of Manitowoc swore in a statement that he saw the prosecution's key trial witness plant the murder victim's RAV4 vehicle on the property of Steven Avery.

In other words, a credible resident swears he caught conspirators red-handed in a frame-up scheme in Wisconsin's infamous murder case drawing headlines in state post-conviction litigation.

Sowinski appears the stuff of movies — maybe, some mused, in response Wisconsin's new attorney general would seek to vacate two murder convictions, amid a vow to clean up law enforcement in east-central Wisconsin.

DOJ delay strategy

The Wisconsin Dept of Justice quickly responded on April 16 to the Sowinski statement.

The DOJ filing includes unfounded accusations challenging attorney Zellner's ethics, and a bizarre statement complaining about the fact that Avery spotlights more prosecutorial misconduct for allegedly withholding exculpatory evidence — a Brady violation.

This is the same tactic launched at Zellner by the State of Missouri in her successful exoneration of Ryan Ferguson.

The DOJ asserted that the sheer multiplicity of alleged Brady violations in the record should be read against the defense.

Avery's attorney, Zellner, reacted with restrained outrage.

Zellner replied to the Court on April 22, 2021: "It is a supreme irony that in one of the most blatant examples of a wrongful conviction the State's only response is to falsely accuse Mr. Avery's lead counsel of nefarious conduct for discovering a 6th Brady violation. Rather than seeking justice, the State wants to 'slay the messenger' by putting forth more false allegations, a skill that it has mastered over the last 16 years. The State turns a blind eye towards its past actions of withholding exculpatory evidence."

The Democratic-led DOJ said nothing about the substance of Sowinski's sworn statement, or that the prosecution apparently failed to notify the defense about this witness after he contacted the Manitowoc Sheriff's department in 2005.

The defamatory ethics violation accusation against Zellner was quickly disconfirmed by Zellner and the DOJ never mentioned the matter again, failing to apologize and straighten out the record.

Dems stand with police

Why is the Democratic-led DOJ defending the work of Kenneth R. Kratz, former Calumet County District Attorney, (1992-2010), who was forced to resign in disgrace in 2010 for outrageous conduct in 2009, just two years after prosecuting the Avery-Dassey cases?

Kratz is self-described as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder, sexual compulsion disorder and multiple drug addictions.

Kratz described himself a "dick" for his work as district attorney in which he claimed he could not help himself harassing crime victims because of his disorders for which he was undergoing professional treatment, amid an allegation he possibly assaulted a woman.

Wisconsin Democratic Party officials, Gov. Tony Evers and Attorney General Joshua Kaul, have made the political decision to work for law enforcement, even Ken Kratz, against the wrongfully convicted.

This is political liberalism at its most vicious and irrational.

One month into his term in 2019, Kaul filed legal responses signaling the DOJ would stall Avery's  possible exoneration by filing procedural objections.

The quality of mercy towards the innocent appears to be exhausted under the warrant of Wisconsin Democrats.
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Why are demonstrably innocent peoples' lives being destroyed in Wisconsin? 

Why do so many accept what the Wisconsin Judiciary and criminal justice system are doing?

It's an old story: See Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (University of Chicago Press. ©1955).

Mayer, an American Jewish writer who had gone to Germany in the 1930s, made friends with 10 people, all of whom were members of the NAZI Party. He found them courteous, funny, genuine human beings whom he called "friends."

They were also fools and certainly were guilty.

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From Milton Mayer:

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government. ..."

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security."

This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter."

"You will understand me when I say that my Middle High German was my life. It was all I cared about. I was a scholar, a specialist. Then, suddenly, I was plunged into all the new activity, as the university was drawn into the new situation; meetings, conferences, interviews, ceremonies, and, above all, papers to be filled out, reports, bibliographies, lists, questionnaires. And on top of that were the demands in the community, the things in which one had to, was ‘expected to’ participate that had not been there or had not been important before. It was all rigmarole, of course, but it consumed all one’s energies, coming on top of the work one really wanted to do. You can see how easy it was, then, not to think about fundamental things. One had no time." ...