Failed state

I wonder if Wisconsin has any idea what an international embarrassment it has become? By rights it ought to be an unexceptionable place, little more than the quirky answer to the occasional trivia question: ‘Where is the Badger State?’; ‘Whose state governor shares a name with the singer of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)?”’; ‘Which US state makes more Swiss cheese than Switzerland?’

Sadly for this unassuming Great Lakes state — pop. six million — it has instead become an exemplar of the kind of official corruption, mendacity, hypocrisy, bovine incompetence and rampant injustice less often associated with the leader of the free world and the beacon of democracy than with Islamofascist republics, equatorial African kleptocracies and other third-world hellholes.

This is all thanks to the Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer, which holds the state’s apparatus responsible for one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in recent history. Two men have been rotting behind bars for many years for a brutal murder which, it seems increasingly clear, they did not commit. Worse still, it appears that on some level the state’s authorities — from local law enforcement to the attorney general — are aware that the convictions are unsafe, but are in far too deep to backtrack now, and so are fighting all the way to the Supreme Court to uphold the terrible injustice they have perpetrated.

A big claim, I know — and one you probably couldn’t have made after the first series when the waters were still pretty muddy. But this latest, Making a Murderer 2, has acquired a mesmerising and spectacularly persuasive dea ex machina in the form of Kathleen Zellner. Zellner, a cool, tenacious, Texan-born, Chicago-based lawyer, specialises in correcting miscarriages of justice. Since 1991 she has obtained exonerations for 19 wrongfully convicted men.