Netflix’s hit crime documentary Making A Murderer has given us some unlikely sex symbols. Steven Avery’s defense lawyers Dean Strang and Jerry Buting have both gotten a lot of attention on social media, and then there’s all the reporters that were shown covering the trial back in 2006. Angenette Levy has a lot of admirers from the show, but her fame pales in comparison to former NBC26 reporter Aaron Keller, dubbed ‘Silver Fox’ by fans for his distinctive grey hair.
But this article isn’t about Silver Fox and his sexy ways. Aaron Keller has since left the world of journalism for law, and says the Steven Avery case is what inspired the move. While studying for his law degree, he realized just how unethical some aspects of the trial were. Here he is discussing Ken Kratz’s infamous press conference after the arrest of Brendan Dassey that claimed Avery and Dassey raped, tortured, and butchered Teresa Halbach with a knife. (via Rolling Stone)
“The general rule in the model rules for professional conduct is that attorneys can’t make statements to the press that would cause material prejudice to a case. Basically it’s a blueprint for almost every law enforcement and prosecutorial press conference everywhere, ever. You can give the name of the accused. Age. Address. You know, identifying information. If there is an active search for someone who is an outstanding suspect, there can be a plea for public health in finding someone.”
“The American Bar Association writes the model rules. One of the rules says that an attorney can discuss with the press anything that’s on the public record. Ken Kratz — whose professional conduct I called into question on TV after the press conference, and who got madder than heck at me and hung up on me when I had to call him and ask him about it — his response was, “Well, I can talk about anything that’s on the public record.” Well, the problem was, as the prosecutor, he has the power to write up the criminal complaint in the matter, and the criminal complaint is the public record.”
Keller has a keen eye for noticing discrepancies in the way the law operates. When he was studying the admissibility of scientific testing data, he reached out to Dean Strang and Jerry Buting because what he was being taught didn’t jive with how things had gone down in the Steven Avery trial. It turns out that Wisconsin had a different standard than the rest of the country.
Most other states follow the Daubert Standard, which only allows tests that have been peer reviewed. This would have kept the prosecution from using the last minute testing protocol concocted by the FBI to test for evidence of EDTA in samples of Steven Avery’s blood found at the scene. The law in Wisconsin has since changed but still isn’t up to the Daubert Standard.
Keller says if Making a Murderer pushes people to do anything, it should be to investigate the system and push it toward better standards and practices. “That’s the way law works in this country,” he told Rolling Stone. “It is not carved in stone. It is a more fluid system, but it is only a fluid system if we, together, as a society, vow to examine it critically and to change it when change is necessary.”
