Steven Avery served as an easy scapegoat for a deputy with a personal vendetta. The Avery family, designated outsiders in their town, marked him from birth as someone who was a delinquent. This, coupled with his repeated criminal offenses such as robbery, burning his cat for which he received time, and most importantly, pulling a gun on the deputy sheriff’s wife, marked him as a target whom the sheriff’s department and general population would be extremely unsympathetic towards.
Avery appeared to be immediately implicated in the crime even when there was no evidence against him. The victim, Penny Beernsten, was instantly manipulated into believing wholeheartedly that Avery was the culprit by the sheriff on duty. When the sheriff arrived at the scene and received no more than a few details regarding the assailant, she implicated Avery based on prejudices against his family. The sheriff also happened to be friends with Beernsten, making this information all the more reliable to her. From this point on, the investigation was contaminated.
The police continued to push the narrative of Avery’s guilt even after multiple solid alibis were produced. They went as far as to create a forensic sketch based on a previous picture of Avery rather than details the victim had provided. It should be noted that immediately following the crime, Beernsten described her assailant’s eye color and height as vastly different from Avery’s. Despite this, after being shown photos of Avery presented as a possible suspect, when it came to a lineup identification, she identified Avery without trouble and with absolute certainty.
This type of distortion in memory is much too similar to the Snyder case and is a result of poor police practices. If the police had not previously shown images of Avery to Beernsten or conducted a more thorough investigation into potential suspects, perhaps she would have been able to identify her assailant. Thompson, the true culprit, was repeatedly ignored by the sheriff’s department despite the fact that his possible guilt was presented directly to the sheriff’s deputy. This was likely due to the deputy sheriff’s prejudice against Avery due to his altercation with his wife. As such, the deputy sheriff should have been removed from this case entirely to avoid bias. (372)
I agree that the deputy sheriff should have been removed from this case, but she wasn’t the only person in the department with a bias against Avery. If the case were to be done without prejudice, almost everyone in the department would have been put off the case.
In a perfect world, despite whatever bias a police officer has towards or against a person, they should be able to perform their duties professionally, following the code of conduct and properly investigating every piece of evidence to rule out every explanation to prove without reasonable doubt that indeed, a person is guilty.