Hillary Clinton said Tuesday that she is unaware of the popular Netflix documentary “Making a Murderer,” but appeared to assume in her response to a question about the series that the two convicts featured in it are black.
But Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey — the two men convicted of the murder that is at the center of the 10-part series — are actually white. The Wisconsin natives were convicted in separate trials for the 2005 murder of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach.
“Making a Murderer” lays out evidence that investigators may have framed Avery for the murder. They also showed disturbing footage showing investigators coercing a confession out of the then-16-year-old Dassey, who is Avery’s nephew.
Dassey has an IQ of around 70 and later recanted his confession.
Asked by an attendee at a town hall event in Iowa on Tuesday whether she was familiar with the controversial case, which has sparked intense debate in the national media and online, Clinton shook her head to indicate that she had never heard of it. And due in part to that lack of familiarity with the documentary, Clinton appeared to believe that the case was another example of the criminal justice system being unfair to African-Americans.
“I think we do have a systemic problem in our criminal justice system,” Clinton said, adding that “it is true that there’s enough evidence to show that if you are an African-American man you are more likely to be arrested, charged, convicted and incarcerated for doing the same thing as a white man. And there’s just a lot of evidence of that. And of course, if you are poor that makes it even more likely.”
When discussing criminal justice reform on the campaign trail Clinton often portrays it in racial terms, frequently issuing the rallying cry “Black Lives Matter.”