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Avery and his supporters got to speak directly to camera; their opponents didn’t, though apparently not for want of being asked. (They then got to complain about the film-makers being biased against them.) They were still, thanks to the archive footage, vividly present: characters all. But then so was everybody who appeared. You couldn’t make them up, either, though many writers and actors would surely love to. The defence lawyers, in particular, were a parade of casting director’s dreams: the local lady, folksy but sharp, who was Steven’s first resource on the rape charge and who declared that he wasn’t smart enough to be guilty; the silky, avuncular public defender who succeeded her; the sophisticated dream team at the murder trial — clever, painstakingly decent men whose very names, Dean and Jerry, seemed to have predestined them to be a double act. (As did their statures: one short, one tall.)

Then there were Steven’s parents: the defiant mother who could be a dead ringer for Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, the father angry but resigned; unlike John Moore, I thought his final appearance tending his garden both moving and relevant. There was Steven himself, perpetually baby-faced (they kept showing his baby pictures for comparison) even as the rest of him aged disturbingly; we were told he had an IQ of 70, though he always seemed remarkably logical and articulate; you may not have liked him but it was hard while watching not to believe him. (And, unlike Dreyfus, he never, on either charge, took the option of a guilty plea. Instead he immersed himself in law-books.) Even more disturbing was his nephew Brendan Dassey, a 16-year old boy, convicted as his uncle’s accomplice; the two were tried separately, with the same DA presenting scenarios that cancelled one another out. We saw Brendan, educationally subnormal and with no parent or lawyer present, goaded and bewildered into making a confession — which he subsequently and repeatedly and unavailingly retracted. (When his mother, on the phone, asked him why he had told the investigators what he thought they wanted to hear, he said “that’s how I do my homework.” It’s on tape. Like his request that, having confessed to murder, he be allowed to go home to complete a school project.) It’s ironic: since interrogations have to be recorded, Brendan’s questioners, coercing him into condemning himself out of his own mouth, condemned themselves out of theirs. Not that they’ve suffered for it.