Wisconsin Admits State Gave Murder Victim's Family 'Many Bones' — Confirming Assertions Made by Wrongfully Convicted Man's Attorney

Kathleen Zellner, depicted above in image, has shown
beyond serious dispute Wisconsin has framed, destroyed
exculpatory evidence, and secretly broken state laws, all
to convict and protect the convictions of two innocent
men. Though disgraced jurists like Ken Kratz, Josh Kaul,
and many others characters employed by the Wisconsin
Department of Justice do not know it, the truth has a way
of coming out even in Wisconsin. Image from
innocence supporter, JamesBond 007, UK.

Cover-up Continues, as Attorney General Still Opposes Hearing on Destruction of Evidence

Madison, Wisconsin — The state of Wisconsin admitted that law enforcement and prosecutors secretly gave the family of murder victim Teresa Halbach her bodily remains, a 2011 illegal scheme that the state variously claimed is either delivery of animal bones or human bones.

The 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach and the frame-up of wrongfully convicted Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey are featured in Making a Murderer.

"The State has confirmed with us that they did in fact give 'many bones' back to [Teresa Halbach's] TH’s family. They have no proof they gave notice to SA [Steven Avery] or his attorneys = violation state law [and] due process," writes Avery's post-conviction attorney, Kathleen Zellner.

FYI: The State has confirmed with us that they did in fact give “many bones” back to TH’s family. They have no proof they gave notice to SA or his attorneys =violation state law & due process. @RollingStone @BBCWorld @Newsweek #MakingAMurderer2

— Kathleen Zellner (@ZellnerLaw) February 19, 2019

The admission is significant because, as Zellner told Newsweek, "This admission proves these bone fragments were returned to the family and it is undisputed there was no notice given to Steven Avery or his attorneys and that violates Wisconsin law, ... When any of these bones were returned to the Halbach’s Wisconsin State law and due process were violated. The State has confirmed returning many of the bones to the Halbach’s so the court should grant our motion to stay and remand."

Yes, the appellate court should grant the motion.

But lawyers at the Wisconsin Department of Justice do not want to appear in Sheboygan County Court, the jurisdiction to which the case would be remanded or sent back, and explain in a public hearing why the state violated state law in giving likely exculpatory evidence to the family of a murder victim.

It's unclear why the DoJ attorneys are worried.

Sheboygan County Court Angela W. Sutkiewicz is a prosecutor's judge.

Sutkiewicz will flack and cover for the state of Wisconsin. Even if a video surfaced with law enforcement discussing ways of framing Steven Avery, Sutkiewicz would rule, 'nothing to see here,' and this is no new evidence.

Sutkiewicz substitutes her affinity for prosecutors in place of neutral adjudication. To be accused means you have no rights, to be convicted means law enforcement can do no wrong, in what passes for Sutkiewicz' legal mind in Wisconsin.

In 2017, Sutkiewicz rejected Steven Avery's request for a trial made through his post-conviction attorney, Kathleen Zellner.

Sutkiewicz issued her ruling and opinion without ordering and conducting an evidentiary hearing on Kathleen Zellner's 1,200-page post-conviction motion, replete with expert forensic testimony and analyses.

"The judge criticized the defense conclusions as 'speculative' and based on 'interim opinions' by experts," notes Heavy. com.

On June 14, 2018, Avery through Zellner filed a motion for judicial substitution of Sutkiewicz, (Fox-11, Digital). The state of course objected to the motion for a new judge, (Fox-11 News).
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Sutkiewicz' court is a first procedural step for what in most states would already be a conviction that would have been vacated or reversed.

It's likely Kathleen Zellner has gamed out the procedural map dozens of steps into the future.

It's just as likely, should Avery's conviction not be reversed or vacated, Avery's case will eventually appear before the Wisconsin Supreme Court, where the population will learn what a Brady motion violation is, and why the state's Brady violations should also result in vacating the wrongful conviction.

Zellner's explosive motion Jan 24, 2019 seeking a hearing because the Calumet County Sheriff's Office secretly transferred evidence, the remains of a murder victim, Teresa Halbach, to private custody in 2011, in violation of state statutes that govern preservation of physical evidence collected, subject to criminal investigations is being adjudicated. So, we wait.
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In other developments, Avery advocates report that numerous Twitter accounts —  advocating DNA testing and law enforcement abiding by state law —  have been mysteriously shut down in actions apparently traced to persons close to the disgraced ex-district attorney and sex offender, Ken Kratz.

Kratz prosecuted Avery and Brendan Dassey, pleading two contradictory accounts of the same murder, in violation of Wisconsin ethical rules for prosecutors.

Wisconsin Law Enforcement Is a Clown Show That Has Veered into the Malice, Pathology of a Crime Family

Wisconsin law enforcement is a menace to humanity.

Update: For more Making a Murderer-related pieces dating back to 2015, see MaM results.
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Madison, Wisconsin — Wisconsin law enforcement was displayed to the world in the Making a Murderer docu-series that shines a light on the malicious prosecutions of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey.

There's the prosecuting attorney in both cases, ex-Calumet County district attorney Ken Kratz, who can no longer practice law in Wisconsin, and was chased out of office in 2010 after 10 different sexual harassment complaints came to light.

Now, Kratz lives on a public pension and defends himself against allegations of misconduct in his contradictory accounts of the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach.

Ken Kratz' wife is a Trump-loving political rightwinger, just like Kratz. Leah Kratz publicly mocks and taunts Avery, innocence advocates, including atty Kathleen Zellner, for post-conviction litigation that points out in legal filings the state destroyed and manipulated evidence in plain violation of state law and Avery's Constitutional rights.

Writes Kratz this weekend:

Hey guys, Stevie’s still sitting in a jail cell 🙌🏻👏🏻🙌🏻👏🏻 #MakingAMurderer #MakingAMurderer2 Keep dragin ass, Kathleen. We love it! 😁😁

— Leah Kratz (@LeahMarieKK) February 16, 2019

One can garner much about the culture of east-central Wisconsin from this one tweet from an unhinged hick.

But lucky for Ken Kratz and his ilk in the Manitowoc and Calumet County sheriff offices, they have a friend they may not have counted on: Wisconsin's new Attorney General Josh Kaul (D).

Josh Kaul's office through co-counsel Mark Williams and Thomas Fallon is carrying on the crusade against Avery and Dassey with the same lack of ethics and regard for law that defined the tenure of Kaul's three predecessors in the Wisconsin Dept of Justice.
Writes Amelia McDonell-Parry in Rolling Stone this weekend:

Attorney Kathleen Zellner has filed a new letter with the Wisconsin Court of Appeals on behalf of her client, Steven Avery, accusing the Attorney General’s Office of 'trying to deceive' her and the Court about the status of key forensic evidence in the Making a Murderer case. Zellner’s letter, submitted on February 13th, is actually her second letter to the court in as many days; both letters supplement a January 24th motion that accused prosecutors of violating state law and Avery’s constitutional rights by destroying evidence. Zellner tells Rolling Stone that she has since learned that a key piece of evidence — suspected human pelvic bone fragments, which could exonerate her client — may have been destroyed as well. And, she says, prosecutors are 'obstructing' her efforts to find out. ...

On the morning of February 13th, Zellner received a voicemail from attorney Mark Williams, who is co-counsel on the Avery case alongside Fallon and Gahn. The voicemail and transcript were filed along with her February 13th letter, and provided to Rolling Stone and can be heard here. Williams appears to be under the mistaken impression that he’s leaving a message Fallon(.)

This message has done little to dissuade Zellner’s fears that the pelvic bone fragments have been destroyed as well. At the very least, Zellner tells Rolling Stone, the message strongly suggests that prosecutors aren’t certain that the bones are still in evidence.

'This is another first for me,' Zellner tells Rolling Stone. 'Many times I have felt that certain prosecutors were obstructing my efforts, but this is the first time a prosecutor has actually called my phone and left a message confirming that fact. It’s really very thoughtful of them.'

Zellner also believes that by destroying the bones, the State not only violated their own statute, they’ve also denied Avery his constitutional right to due process according to Arizona v. Youngblood. The 1988 Supreme Court decision requires proof that the State acted in 'bad faith' by destroying or losing evidence — it’s a very difficult standard to meet, but Zellner believes this case would qualify. Her January 24th motion asks for the case be remanded back to the Circuit Court so it can address these claims, both of which would all but require the court to overturn Avery’s conviction.

'They’ve been lying all this time about it — and they’ve been lying to the court,' Zellner continues. 'This whole concealment of what happened to the bones is really a way bigger issue than testing them even, because if they’ve been destroyed it’s a violation of their state statute. I don’t know if it’s a felony, but it’s it’s up there. And that’s what the court is grappling with.'

What Attorney General Josh Kaul should have done following developments in the preceding days is draft a letter to the Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation, and chronicle what Kaul has learned the last three months; arrange a conference with the four appellate justices hearing post-conviction litigation; and admit to a pattern of breaches of ethics and state law.

Kaul had better be in consultation with an ethical advisor as well.

Wisconsin news outlets regard law enforcement misconduct as radioactive. And Kaul and law enforcement are arrogant, confident they get away with much misconduct in a lazy state.

But stay tuned. Despots usually think they're untouchable, but they are rarely correct in this assessment.

#WakeUpWisconsin #WorkWithKZ @GovEvers @WisDOJ exonerate Steven and Brendan then you can get to work on sorting out your corrupt police and prosecutors out!! Ken Kratz and co should be in prison NOT Steven and Brendan #FreeStevenAvery #FreeBrendanDassey https://t.co/LuUsUE7iaI

— Paula Sampson (@PaulaPoolton) February 17, 2019

Making a Murderer Victim Is Denied Hearing from United States Supreme Court

The United States Supreme Court denies the petition of
Brandan Dassey, an innocent who will remain in prison for
life. Case is highlighted at the bottom of above Court image.

Wisconsin Republicans lead defense for wrongful convictions such as Dassey's

The United States Supreme Court will not hear the case of Brendan Dassay, who was coerced as a 16-year-old into uttering a false confession that is featured in the 2015 Making a Murderer documentaries.

The so-called confession is the sole basis for the conviction of Dassey. The interrogation was conducted by demonstrably corrupt and dishonest investigators who promised Dassey that he could go back to his high-school class if he could just clear up a question. This led to Dassey’s conviction in the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach.

Writes atty Jerome Buting in May:

So WI Department of "Justice" doesn't care about justice in Brendan's case. They want him to rot in prison because they can't admit they went after innocent 16 yr old boy to convict his uncle.#makingamurderer#cjreform https://t.co/hLxeFy3MfC

— Jerome Buting (@JButing) May 10, 2018

The Court refused to grant cert in Dassey's petition, and its refusal came with a simple list of cases denied, a quiet snuffing out of a man's life, (highlighted at bottom of image, at right).

Wisconsin law enforcement, as with the rest of the nation, attracts Republicans and criminal personality types for whom prosecuting and imprisoning innocent people is seen a means to establish careers and gratifying a need to harm people.

The United States Supreme Court denies the petition of
Brandan Dassey, an innocent who will remain in prison for
life. Case is highlighted at the bottom of above Court image.

The Dassey case is featured along with another wrongful prosecution, Steven Avery, in the Making a Murderer series.

Len Kachinsky, Dassey's attorney, threw Dassey, a cognitively challenged 16-year-old, to two criminal investigators, Mark Wiegert, (sergeant at the Calumet County Sheriff's Office), and Tom Fassbender (Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation investigator), who in 2005 weren't looking for the truth but trying to get Dassey to mutter words portrayed as admissions of guilt and supporting a lurid, contrived tale of guilt of Avery in the revenge prosecution (Ferek, Appleton Post-Crescent).

Wiegert, Fassbender and former District Attorney and sex offender Ken Kratz contrived a case against two men whom they knew to be innocent.

Republican-led state police organizations in 2008 awarded Wiegert and Fassbender actual awards for their work in railroading innocent people.

As noted here previously, in America there exists a hostile and deceitful domestic police force, a careerist, conviction-at-any-costs prosecutorial ethos, racism and taboo ethics in the criminal justice system, and a commitment of district attorneys to defend wrongful convictions irrespective of truth or any consideration of justice present conditions perfect for mass incarceration constituting a "leviathan unmatched in human history," (Glenn C. Loury, Boston Review).

We're there, people.

Consider if your daughter, brother, father or mother were wrongfully convicted. Who stands with you then?

Think it could not happen to you? It happened to Penny Brummer in 1994, a young military veteran wrongfully convicted by a Dane County jury because in part she is an out lesbian.

Ask the family of U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska, 1968-2009) (1923-2010), (Cary, Rollcall). The reader will have a full-blooded understanding of a Brady violation.

Ask the mother of Madison, Wisconsin's Penny Brummer: Interrogated, defamed, arrested, convicted and sentenced to what amounts to a life sentence.

Contrary to popular wisdom we live in a land of the Sovereign (the people of the state and not the law) and bad faith and deceit on the part of law enforcement are a huge part of the problem.

I'm thankful for the Richard Posners, the Sidney Powells (there is a force of nature), and the Alex Kozinski for shining lights on not a democracy, but a brutal prison state. And am always mindful of I.F. Stone's admonition: "Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed." First read this quote in 1985 on a large poster that used to occupy a prominent place of the late Erwin Knoll's (NYT) wall at the Progressive Magazine, a journal carrying out this legacy and reporting the truth to this day.

The only route for Dassey now is a pardon from a new Wisconsin governor if one is elected in November. It's a long shot.

Making of a Murderer Appellate Decision Shows American Police State at Work

Image -Kathe Kollwitz, (1867-1945). Kollwitz is a major
anti-fascist artist who lived in Germany.

Update: Judges David Hamilton, Frank Easterbrook, Michael Kanne and Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit are dishonest people. Hamilton in his rush to reverse the federal court decision that would have freed Brendan Dassey confused Bobby Dassey with his older brother, Brendan Dassey. JFC. Critical reading.
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When Richard Posner announced his resignation from the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in September 2017, it was clear real people would get hurt in his absence from the bench.

Posner blew the whistle on the federal judiciary, telling Adam Liptak in the New York Times that judges are not-so-judicious and often vicious: "there are others who are just, you know, reactionary beasts. They’re reactionary beasts because they want to manipulate the statutes and the Constitution in their own way," said Posner.

Posner had people like the innocent-and-convicted-anyway Brendan Dassey in mind.

Dassey was railroaded by east-central Wisconsin human garbage and convicted of crimes of which the cops knew Dassey to be innocent. The case drew outrage after it was featured in Making of a Murderer.

The conviction was reversed this year in federal court. Now, reactionary beasts on the Seventh Circuit reinstated the conviction in (16-3397), Dassey v. Dittman last week.

There is almost never accountability for the inhumane infliction against the innocent. Police and prosecutors remain immune to virtually any crime they inflict.

In Dassey v. Dittman, Judges David Hamilton, Frank Easterbrook, Michael Kanne and Diane Sykes of the Seventh Circuit are reactionary beasts, dishonestly and indifferently snuffing out an innocent, young life.

I wish Posner had been around for just a few months more.

Writes James Warren:

It's ironic — maybe tragic — that Richard Posner, generally conceded to be perhaps the most influential judge-academic of his generation and the most influential judge not on the Supreme Court, suddenly and surprisingly quit the Chicago appeals court and retired in September at a still prolific 78. If he were around, the odds are that he would have voted with the dissenters, made it 4-4 and thus affirmed the earlier reversal of Dassey's conviction.

But no. Dassey will remain in prison, it would appear, until he dies. It might prompt you to download the Netflix series. And, as you watch, be reminded of the strengths of journalism — but how even the most meticulously detailed conclusions can lead ultimately to exasperation, not satisfaction, and precious little attention. 

So, an innocent life is extinguished, Dassey is gone, unless the United States Supreme Court accepts his case when it's appealed.

Exasperation, disgust, and revulsion are features thinking people note in examining the United States criminal justice system. These are not emotions in this context, they're a formless creature of malice and indifference that is the American criminal justice system that exudes what it inflicts.

Whether the victim is Penny Brummer, or Brendan Dassey, the perpetrators are cops and prosecutors, and we are mostly by-standers.

Film Series Provokes Panicked and Irrational Defenders of Wrongful Prosecution

The Making a Murderer (on Netflix) is bringing forth the Evangelical certainty of the fools and fanatics defending a malicious prosecution.

One Donna Jean (Facebook) just knows the second wrongful prosecution of Steven Avery (and Brendan Dassey) is justified because, "it is like watching fox news. I don't need to watch its entirety to know what it is."

So comes the desperate protections, accompanied with the predictable level of low-grade commentary such as Ms. Jean's, of this miscarriage of justice chronicled in Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos' Making a Murderer (on Netflix).

Already a voting juror has contacted the two producers who appeared on the Today Show (Stump) Tuesday, alleging juror misconduct and fear for his/her life contingent on a guilty vote.

Meanwhile, the former Special Prosecutor Kenneth Kratz—a deceitful piece of human garbage—is desperately, (and rather passionately for a prosecutor drummed out of the Calumet County District Attorney's office for sexual misconduct in 2010), trying to defend this wrongful and malicious prosecution.

Understand why Scott Walker was elected governor of Wisconsin?

Not many big fans of Robert Jackson across rural Wisconsin:

"Any prosecutor who risks his day-to-day professional name for fair dealing to build up statistics of success has a perverted sense of practical values, as well as defects of character. Whether one seeks promotion to a judgeship, as many prosecutors rightly do, or whether he returns to private practice, he can have no better asset than to have his profession recognize that his attitude toward those who feel his power has been dispassionate, reasonable and just."
—Attorney General Robert H. Jackson, April 1, 1940; (U.S. DoJ)

A series of inflammatory news conferences in 2006 by special prosecutor Kenneth Kratz alleged that the nephew of Avery was taken into custody and "admitted his involvement and that of Avery in the [Teresa Halbach] death," (AP, March 10, 2006). A "motion filed in Manitowoc County Circuit Court said the release of 'lurid' [alleged] statements by Dassey, as well as information about physical evidence and other opinions about Avery's guilt, could make a fair trial impossible."

Readers can help by contacting the Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation and ask why these press conferences did not violate Wisconsin Supreme Court Rule [SCR 20:3.6 Trial publicity], stating: "(a) A lawyer who is participating or has participated in the investigation or litigation of a matter shall not make an extrajudicial statement that the lawyer knows or reasonably should know will be disseminated by means of public communication and will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing an adjudicative proceeding in the matter."

It does appear that Kratz also used his discretionary power in these press conferences to obtain a dishonest advantage over Steven Avery in violation of SCR 946.12(3):

946.12 Misconduct in public office.

(3) Whether by act of commission or omission, in the officer's or employee's capacity as such officer or employee exercises a discretionary power in a manner inconsistent with the duties of the officer's or employee's office or employment or the rights of others and with intent to obtain a dishonest advantage for the officer or employee or another;

Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation
Keith Sellen, Director
110 East Main Street, Suite 315
Madison, WI 53703-3383
Phone: (608)267-7274 or (877) 315-6941
Fax: (608) 267-1959