I hesitate to speculate because I don't know anymore or less than anyone else sitting behind a keyboard....Ultimately, I think it's possible (and very likely) that Steven Avery is guilty AND just as likely that investigators/prosecutors that were out of their depth tipped the scales in their favor to assure that he he didn't walk on a technicality.
Just finished watching last night and I agree with you. From what I gathered it seems likely that both are guilty but that the police are also guilty of "massaging" evidence. Not having all of the evidence available to us as viewers that the jury had, however, we cannot and should not make concrete assessments.
I also believe, that had the trials of Avery and his nephew taken place in a place like Los Angeles, the results would have been quite different. I was surprised that it wasn't at least a hung jury
based on what we were shown on the show.
A few years ago, I was a juror in a murder trial in the Los Angeles area that went on for about 6 weeks. There was compelling evidence of guilt on the count of murder in the first degree and conspiracy to commit murder. The defendant was a Hispanic woman accused of bludgeoning her husband in his bed with a piece of steel pipe. He was then carried out into his truck (by co-conspirators, allegedly) and shot dead and abandoned under a freeway overpass. The prosecution's main witness was a Fillipino guy, neighbor across the street, who testified that he saw who he believed was the wife (it was nighttime) along with another person, load the body onto the victims pick-up truck. Partly due to the language barrier and largely because he kept changing his story, his testimony proved not credible. Without getting into more details, even though there was blood spatters on the defendant's jeans with her husband's DNA on it, we could not reach a unanimous verdict after 5 days of deliberating. We had 3 votes for guilty and 9 votes for not guilty on the mureder charge. On the conspiracy charge we were more evely split at 5 to 7, I believe. On the morning of the verdict, one lady wanted to change her vote on the murder charge to guilty but she never approached the Bailiff with that switch, and it was academic, anyway. The deliberating process was one of the worst experiences of my life. The whole thing became very personal and ugly.