First off, this song is stuck in my head.

Sorry for the Cosby content, but that’s the only version of it I could find that wasn’t some schmuck playing guitar in his basement.

That taken care of, let’s talk about Making a Murder. After all, everyone else is!

I hadn’t planned on watching it yet. I was happy watching the latest season of Ultimate Spider-Man. It continues to be an excellent show with good writing and so, so much rich nerdy goodness in terms of including tons of stuff from all over the Marvel Universe.

I mean, they had Cloak and Dagger! And Ka-zar and Zabu in the Savage Land^[1]! Sometimes it seems like they are creating episodes directly out of my old comic collection. I am just waiting for Dazzler to show up.

Ooh, or Moon Knight. If he can stop being such a dick all the time.

But then, the amorphous amoeba that is the modern media mind decided, all at once, that it was time to start talking about Making a Murder, and I figured I had better watch it before the spoilers really start flying.

Plus, it would be nice to have a chance to take part in the conversation while it is current for a change.

So I started watching it, and at first it was rough going because it’s really depressing, so I went back to Spider-Man for a while. But now I am back.

And I am two episodes in, and it is something that happens in that second episode that I want to talk about tonight. Specifically, the second half of the second episode.

That is the part where they various people responsible for putting Steven Avery in jail for 18 years for a crime he did not commit are on the stand themselves. The evidence of their grossly un-Constitutional and blatantly wrong behaviour, as well of their trying to cover their asses the moment Steven got released, is absolutely damning. A teenager with a good head for facts could have prosecuted them. There was absolutely no doubt that Steven would win his civil suit against the county and the individuals responsible, and any fool could see that.

But still, their squirm. They prevaricate. They try to wriggle out of things. I almost felt bad for this one woman who was asked a question for which there was no “good” answer for her, and you could see she was desperately looking for a way out.

But there was no way out.

And that got me to thinking about how people react when they are caught in a lie. I have seen a number of real crime type shows that show the same sort of behaviour, and the sheer illogicality of it makes it fascinating to me.

It’s clearly not about actually getting away with it. Rationally speaking, there is no chance of that and they know it. The adult thing to do would be to confess to what you know you did, and take your punishment.

But instead, people end up coming across like this kid :

Your guilt is as clear as the chocolate on your face, kiddo.

But people do it anyhow, and we have to ask why. It’s clearly something deeper and more primal that any of our higher brain functions.

It has to be the “fear” adrenal response, in both its “run” and “hide” aspects. After all, it’s not like giving up is an option if you are being chased by a predator. No matter how bad it looks, no matter how low the odds are, survival demands that you keep on running (or hiding, or fighting) for as long as you can.

After all, better slim odds than no chance at all, right?

And so, for the average person, even when caught dead to rights in a serious misdeed, the urge to continue to fight until the very last moment is too strong to ignore. It doesn’t matter how laughably futile your efforts are. Most people, even respectable people in high status occupations, are too freaked out to be able to restrain themselves.

It is the person who is mature and honorable enough to accept what is coming to them and refuse to demean themselves with pointless scrabbling who is rare.

Also, I found myself wondering what those people thought about the whole thing once the heat started seriously coming down. Did they tell themselves (and their families) that there was nothing to worry about, there was no way they could lose? Did they curse the fates that brought them to justice? Did they hate the people prosecuting them, even though they were people who can prosecuted hundred of others? Did they somehow convince themselves that, this time, the bad guy (them) should get away with it? Did they think “after all, I have a spouse and kids!”, even though every person they ever put in jail had a family?

Did they feel, on some level, that the law was for people like Steve Avery, not them?

Here’s all you need to know about Steve Avery : He’s a small man with an IQ of 70 from a dirt poor family that kept mostly to themselves. Life gave Steve nothing.

This made him extraordinarily easy to pick on.

And it’s clear that this brought out a very ugly side of people. The side that motivates both bullies and their audience. The side that wants to punish people for being unfortunate enough for being both weird (and hence irritating) and weak (and hence be nonthreatening enough for even the biggest coward to pick on).

So it’s no wonder that these people did not want to admit what they had done.

Because then they would have to admit it to themselves.

And the saddest part is, they probably barely even thought about it at the time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.