Making a Murderer: How Did So Many People Miss the Point?

Typically, I blog on education-related topics, but today I’ll be shifting gears a bit.  Like almost everyone in the county, the Netflix series Making a Murderer consumed a significant chunk of my time recently.  Of all the things that appalled me about the documentary, what I found particularly infuriating was the amount of activity it engendered in the snarkosphere. 

I read several blog posts that I suppose were intended as observational humor about such banalities as how unattractive Dolores Avery is, how unfashionable her clothing was, how moronic her phone conversations with Steven were.  And the more I read, the more I seethed.

Let’s be clear.  The Avery family is white trash.  They are poor.  They are uneducated.  They are physically unattractive.  They’re the kind of folks who think nothing of tossing a tire on a bonfire. You would not want them as neighbors. 

They’re not clever and cuddly white trash, like the gang on Duck Dynasty.  And they’re not sexy, dangerous white trash, like The Sons of Anarchy.  They are reality trash, not reality TV trash.

And that’s kind of the point.

Civil rights are not the sole province attractive, educated people.  You don’t even have to be a particularly nice person to have civil rights.  They are not something you earn; they are simply something you have.  That’s why they’re called “rights” and not “privileges.”  The Constitution exists to protect everyone’s civil rights, even those of the trashy and ignorant. In fact, I would hazard that the trashy and ignorant need the Constitution more; the wealthy and the educated know how to advocate for themselves.

If you watched all ten episodes of Making a Murderer and failed to absorb that, you are part of what is wrong with our justice system.