Avery's Lawyer Is Live-Tweeting Her Investigation

A lot of people flocked to Steven Avery’s defense after watching his murder trial unfold on Making a Murderer, and one of his most high-profile defenders is now making the case for his innocence on Twitter. Kathleen Zellner is an attorney who specializes in exonerating the wrongly convicted, and her firm recently agreed to take on Avery’s case. Now, Zellner is live-tweeting about Avery’s alleged innocence and analyzing crime scene evidence in an attempt to demonstrate that he was framed.

Making a Murderer focuses on Avery’s 2007 conviction for the murder of Teresa Halbach. Avery is currently serving a life sentence for the crime, but the show strongly implies that he was framed for the crime by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, which prosecuted the case. Manitowoc County denies any and all allegations of wrongdoing, and the lawyers who prosecuted Avery still maintain that he’s the one who murdered Halbach.

But Zellner disagrees. In an attempt to demonstrate Avery’s innocence, Zellner has been scrutinizing various pieces of evidence from the trial over twitter. Zellner takes issue with many of them, and they’ll be be familiar to fans of the show: The key, the burn pit, the car, the bullet, and more. Here's what Zellner had to say.

In addition to criticizing the prosecution’s case against Avery, Zellner also theorized on how Avery might have been framed, if indeed he was framed.

The true crime genre has captured the public’s fascination for decades, because who doesn’t like a good mystery? The Internet, however, adds a whole new dimension to the experience. It’s now drastically easier for readers (or in Making a Murderer’s case, viewers) to coordinate with one another as they play armchair detective and try to solve the case on their own. Furthermore, the Internet makes this kind of research a whole lot easier in general, further enticing amateur sleuths to get involved.

That’s what’s happening with Making a Murderer. The Internet detectives over at Reddit have probed the Avery case from every possible angle, and they’ve uncovered at least one potential piece of evidence that eluded even Avery’s previous defense team.

Similarly, Zellner isn’t just using Twitter to draw attention to Avery’s case, although she is doing that that. By tweeting the details of her investigation on social media, she’s also harnessing the power of the Internet’s hive mind. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that she’s crowdsourcing Avery’s legal defense to the Internet, but by bringing amateur investigators into the fold, she is increasing her, and Avery’s chances of success. Who knows if one of her tweets might spark a thought in an Internet sleuth's brain and advance the case for Avery's innocence? After all, a couple million minds are always better than one.