This Powerball & 'MaM' Tweet Is The Real Winner

One tweet Wednesday night may not have won the $1.5 billion lottery payout, but it did win the Internet. Drawing on the Making a Murderer craze and Powerball frenzy, one Twitter user decided to get cheeky by poking fun at both the collective obsession with the enormous potential lottery winnings and one group of public employees' less-than-stellar reputation. Taking a picture of a doctored Powerball ticket, a Philadelphia lawyer tweeted: "BREAKING: Another winning #Powerball ticket has emerged from Wisconsin, employees from Manitowoc Sheriffs Dept."

The tweet is clearly making a jab at the police team which helped send Making a Murderer subjects Steve Avery and Brendan Dassey to prison for the murder of Teresa Halbach. The department and the officers involved in the case, Sgt. Andrew Colborn and Lt. James Lenk, have been accused by both defense lawyers and viewers of planting evidence to frame Avery, due to an alleged vendetta against him and his family. Most notably, there were tweets by a supposed member of Anonymous who claimed to have evidence of such actions — but in the end, the account's tweets were deleted, its name was changed, and other Anonymous-related accounts denied involvement.

The true winners announced so far are not in fact from Wisconsin, but rather from California, Florida, and Tennessee. Tickets bearing the winning numbers — 8, 27, 34, 4, 19 with a Powerball 10 — were sold in at least three different locations, and there could be more. After all, at least 371 million tickets were sold for Wednesday's drawing.

Ironically, Avery might have liked for the sheriff's department, or even the individual officers, to win. That way, they'd have more money for him to sue for. After he was exonerated of the rape for which he spent 18 years behind bars, he sued the department — specifically naming the two officers — for $36 million in damages. His civil lawsuit against the county was settled for $400,000 after his arrest for murder, but that was not the last they would hear from him.

TMZ reported that Avery has sued the police twice from prison — without a lawyer. Once was for missing gas and damages to his car, which was taken during the investigation into the death of 25-year-old Teresa Halbach, whom Avery was later convicted of killing. He wanted $455 for the damage and gas, as well as an additional $250,000 in punitive damages. He lost the case.

Future civil suits could be brought by Avery's new lawyer, Kathleen Zellner. She is well-known both for winning exoneration cases and for making sure that her clients get big payouts. She won the largest payout in Illinois history in the case of Kevin Fox's false arrest, netting him $15.5 million. Fox had been charged with the death of his three-year-old daughter, but Zellner won his case. It was reduced to $8.1 million on appeal. Zellner has also filed a $100 million lawsuit for civil rights violations in the case of Ryan Ferguson, who was freed after spending 10 years in prison for a murder he says he didn't commit. As a teenager, Ferguson was convicted of killing a local sports journalist, but key witnesses later recanted their testimony.

But in bad news for both the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Department and Avery, one of the few things they could possibly see eye-to-eye on is just a joke. Here's hoping that the ticket held by whomever is actually hoping to collect the jackpot is in better shape.

Image: Making A Murderer/Netflix