Sorry to resurrect this thread years later, but wasn't sure where to put this article about the lawsuit (I haven't seen this before today).
[quotation snipped from full article follows]
Before Avery’s legal team had deposed a single witness, there was an arsenal of ammunition from the AG’s office supporting a section 1983 claim. Meanwhile, Avery’s story had entered the national consciousness and Avery himself had become a statewide symbol of a broken criminal justice system in need of repair.
Ultimately, Kelly and Glynn deposed almost forty witnesses on Avery’s behalf. Each set of testimony was more damning than the last and supported the allegation that Avery had been the victim of aggravated constitutional violations. Legally speaking, it was a bloodbath.
“I think the depiction of the Steven Avery story in the [Netflix] series is a positive good,” says Kelly. “It reveals the underbelly of the criminal justice system. Although this is a spectacular case in itself, these operations and biases and countervailing forces that go on in the criminal justice system are daily events. And they require us to think twice about what’s important in that system.”
As the discovery period progressed in Avery’s civil suit, two moments in particular sent a charge through his attorneys.
First, they elicited testimony revealing that Manitowoc County detectives had begun round-the-clock surveillance of Gregory Allen two weeks before the sexual assault on Beernsten in 1985. However, surveillance of Allen was temporarily suspended on the day of the assault because police resources were redirected to another case.
What’s more, Beernsten continued to receive threatening phone calls
after Avery’s arrest, which county sheriff Tom Kocourek dismissed as immaterial. Worst of all, just days after Avery’s arrest, a Manitowoc County detective informed Kocourek that Allen was not under surveillance when the attack occurred, and it was likely that the wrong man was in custody. The detective was told to steer clear of matters outside his jurisdiction.
A second high point during discovery was equally incriminating. Beernsten had identified Avery as her assailant using an image array of suspects. But deposition testimony confirmed that the sheriff’s department had used a booking photo of Avery to generate its forensic composite drawing.
Mug shots of Steven Avery in 1985.
The misstep? The mug shot that inspired the drawing was taken in January of 1985, and Avery’s appearance at that time was dramatically different from how he looked when he was arrested in July. Meanwhile, the department possessed and was aware of a 1983 booking photo of Allen that looked a lot like Avery’s composite drawing, but omitted it from the image array Beernsten reviewed.
“Those were the two moments when we knew—to a degree that you rarely know in a civil right’s suit—that we had the defendants, ice-cold,” recalls Kelly. “I will tell you that in my mind and [co-counsel] Steve Glynn’s mind, if we had to go to trial, the only issue was going to be: ‘how much?’
The Two Sides of the Truth | Boston College Law School Magazine
