Steven Avery's lawyer says ‘intelligent’ people were removed from jury

Jerry Buting: ‘I’ve still got my suspicions about whether something improper occurred during deliberations’

Making A Murderer looks at the case of Steven Avery, imprisoned for sexual assault, then exonerated, and then subsequently jailed for murder

The lawyer of Steven Avery, the protagonist of Netflix’s Making a Murderer series, has claimed the state of Manitowoc struck off “intelligent” people from the jury in his case.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Jerry Buting said that prosecutors for the state removed “everybody who had any significant education level, higher education level” from the panel while whittling down the jury.

“We were looking for jurors who were intelligent, independent, had some significant education so that they could follow the science,” he said.

“The state, obviously, was not.”

In the last episode of the series screen on Netflix, Mr Buting voiced his suspicion that someone in the jury might “know something” during a discussion with other lawyers about new evidence that may prove Avery’s innocence.

One of the examples was a test to determine if there was EDTA in the blood found in Teresa Halbach’s car.

Mr Buting added: “Or some other newly discovered evidence; other people who know something. It may be somebody on the jury.

“It may be somebody who knows something that happened with the jurors. I’ve still got my suspicions whether something improper occurred during the deliberations.”

Mr Buting told Rolling Stone he mentioned this because there are “some indications… that there might have been some other individuals that had some, if not direct, then indirect, influence on them”.

Although he cannot say or identify any particular “individual”, he claims there are "possible indications" it may be members of the police department.

For example, the jurors were not sequestered, meaning they were not removed or isolated from the public at any time during the trial to prevent outside influences from affecting their judgements.

Mr Buting also said that although the jurors were instructed not to engage with any media that may sway their judgement, some of them “were not able to or did not comply with that order”.

He also notes how difficult it was to whittle down the jury, such as in the case of one of the jurors, who had volunteered for the prosecuting Manitowoc Sheriff’s Department in the past.

When asked why someone like that was kept on the jury, he said: “What people don’t understand is that picking a jury… it’s not like you pick who you want. It’s a matter of eliminating who you don’t want.”

Since the series was aired, one of the jurors who sat through the verdict has come forward to tell the filmmakers they “feared for their personal safety” if they didn’t convict Avery.

According to the filmmakers behind the series, Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, the juror reportedly told them that Avery “deserves a new trial”.