Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [122]
The story of Penny Beerntsen and Steven Avery, already a tragic and complicated one, has a terrible coda. In March of 2007, less than four years after he was released from prison, Avery was arrested, tried, and convicted for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach, a 25-year-old Wisconsin woman. It is the first and only time in the history of the Innocence Project that an exoneree has gone on to commit a violent crime.
When I first learned of the conviction, I thought I would leave Penny’s story out of this book. This was, above all, an emotional reaction: I didn’t want to write about the murder, I didn’t want anyone close to the victim to have to face additional media coverage, and I didn’t want to reduce Halbach’s entire life and death to an epilogue in someone else’s story. But it was also a political reaction. I believe in the work of the Innocence Project, and I worried that drawing attention to Avery’s radically atypical story would bolster the already-widespread conviction that there are no innocent people behind bars.*
In part, though, my reaction was professional. The horrifying plot twist makes Penny’s story a difficult and controversial one to tell, and it was tempting to avoid the whole morass. There are, after all, other victims who have misidentified their assailants and faced up to their mistakes—not many, it’s true, but some. As a journalist, I couldn’t help but recognize that those people’s experiences would make better stories—where by “better,” I mean, of course, simpler: simpler narratively, and simpler ethically.
But the more I thought about using a different story, the more troubled I became. The world isn’t a simple place (narratively or, God knows, ethically) and the prospect of trying to pretend that it is—in order to write a chapter about denial—soon became untenably absurd. I knew that part of this chapter was going to be about the potentially insidious attraction, for prosecutors and victims alike, of simple stories (good guys, bad guys, morally satisfying conclusions), and about the way this attraction can lead us into error, including in situations where lives are on the line. Yet there I was yielding to that same attraction myself, edging quietly away from unwelcome and complicated truths.
In the end, I decided to take my cue from Penny. Even in the midst of her triple nightmare—the assault, the misidentification, the murder—she managed to resist the urge to simplify the complexity around her. “There are people who now firmly believe that the DNA was wrong, that Steve was my assailant,” Penny told me. “The sheriff’s deputy, the former deputy, tons of people have said it: that I was duped, that the DNA was either fudged or erroneous. A lot of people are having a hard time accepting now that the DNA was accurate.” But she herself nurtures no such illusions. She understands the science, and she knows that it not only exonerated Avery but implicated another man—one who looked similar, lived in the same area, was known by the police to be dangerous, and is currently serving time in jail for a DNA-based conviction in another rape.
Nor did Penny believe what some other people were saying: that Avery had been framed for Halbach’s murder, that local law enforcement officers were taking revenge for the way the wrongful conviction had made them look bad. Penny knew, from her own trial, that Avery had a history of cruelty to animals, and had once run a neighbor off the road and pointed a rifle at her, backing off only when he realized that her infant daughter was also in the car. During the years Avery was in prison, these facts had almost comforted Penny, serving to assure her that she had accused