At least one person who voted to convict Steven Avery believes the Making A Murderer subject is innocent. The revelation comes via Murderer filmmakers Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, who were interviewed this morning on The Today Show. While the pair didn’t name the juror or reveal his or her sex on the show, they said the juror reached out to them in the weeks following the release of the hit Netflix docuseries. According to Ricciardi, “[The juror] told us that they believe Steven Avery was not proven guilty,” and that he was “framed by law enforcement and that he deserves a new trial, and that if he receives a new trial, in their opinion it should take place far away from Wisconsin.” The juror also told filmmakers that they went along with the decision because they “feared for their personal safety” should there be a mistrial, and that that they’d be willing to testify to that fact should there be a retrial. According to the Today interview, the juror claims there was “compromise” and vote trading in the jury room, something that led to the confusing verdicts in the trial. As Ricciardi put it, “That was the actual word the juror used and went on to describe the jurors ultimately trading votes in the jury room and explicitly discussing, ‘If you vote guilty on this count, I will vote not guilty on this count.’”
In other Making A Murderer news, Penny Beernsten, the woman Avery was wrongly convicted of raping in 1985, has spoken out about both Avery’s initial wrongful conviction and how she feels about him today. In a revealing statement she gave to The Marshall Project, Beernsten said she didn’t participate in Making A Murderer because she felt “the documentarians were too close with Avery’s family and attorneys,” saying “They were very convinced that he was innocent. I was not convinced.” Though she feels like the docuseries does justice to her case, she says her “emotions regarding Steven Avery are complicated,” given his alleged involvement in the disappearance of Teresa Halbach. (She also says he asked her to buy him a house.) The bulk of her statement to the site revolves around her recollections of both her assault and the first case, and it’s an intriguing read for anyone interested in not only Making A Murderer, but also in wrongful convictions, human error, and the many holes in our justice system.