Steve Avery, the subject of Netflix’s popular documentary, Making a Murderer, is getting a new legal team. The New York Daily News reports that Kathleen Zellner, a Chicago lawyer, and Tricia Bushnell, the legal director for the Midwest Innocence Project, will now represent Avery.
“The Zellner Law Firm is looking forward to adding Mr. Avery to its long list of wrongful conviction exonerations,” the firm said in a statement on Friday. Zellner previously represented Ryan Ferguson, a Missouri personal trainer who spent ten years in prison after being wrongfully convicted of a 2001 murder. Ferguson was released from prison in 2013.
In 2007, Avery was given a life sentence for the murder of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach. Netflix’s documentary has cast doubts on the conviction and fans of the series circulated an online petition asking the Obama Administration to grant a pardon to Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, who was also convicted of the murder. The President doesn’t have the power to pardon Avery and Dassey, so a series of appeals is Avery’s best hope for release.
The case’s prosecutor, Ken Kratz, has insisted that Making a Murderer doesn’t present the Avery case accurately, calling the documentary a “defense-generated advocacy piece.”
Image via YouTube screenshot/Netflix.
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