NOTES AND QUOTES UPDATED 07/12/16

(OPENING STATEMENT QUOTE)
A miscarriage of justice can result from non-disclosure of evidence by police or prosecution, fabrication of evidence, poor identification, overestimation of the evidential value of expert testimony, unreliable confessions due to police pressure or psychological instability and misdirection by a judge during trial.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/in_depth/uk/2001/life_of_crime/miscarriages.stm

THE MISCARRIAGE OF JUSTICE

The miscarriage of justice has been around for arguably as long as the idea of justice has however it has only recently become a prominent subject within society for the 21st century.

A lot of cases particularly during the times of slavery and an extreme racial divide (To Kill a Mockingbird) people were incarcerated or killed (as a form of punishment) for a crime that there was no evidence to suggest that they had committed.


VIEWS ON DISABILITY

Similarly, with the miscarriage of justice, disability has always been a taboo subject. In the Greek mythology babies born with a physical disability where left on a cliff.

Acknowledgement of mental disabilities was a major factor in the Victorian era, however it was always associated with madness and occasionally witchcraft due to a lack of understanding.

Disability is often represented as supernatural and dangerous across media. This could have the detrimental effect on people talking about it as they may be feared or labelled/stigmatised which means they will be avoided (SOLELY NEGATIVE)


MY IGNITE PRESENTATION
o Institutions - Netflix - Bias - Law Enforcement
Netflix Bias accusation
O Siding with Avery and Family
1st episode is based on his innocence
Playing on emotions (His Parents)
O ‘Extreme Villainization’ of Law enforcements
All law enforcers
Trying to Change Lawyers
O Dramatisation
Focusing on possibilities rather than the facts
‘domestic perspective’  constant focusing on his home
O Leaving out the facts
To pursue domestic perspective
O Failing to talk about Dassey’s intellectual disability
Recent re-trials – He is now being released
Institutional bias against family
- Class
- Education
- Prejudice
O Forcing perspectives and certain ideologies

Getting his story across
Lack of faith in the system
Believes his innocence

o Genre - Documentary - Changes to it over the years.
O Confused approach – Documentary vs Drama
O Distribution to a large audience

o Representation of Law enforcement - Negative -
                                People with disabilities - Vulnerable, law breakers?
                                Working Class - Gold diggers? e.t.c
o Audience - Impact - Passive vs Active – Influence

o Uses and Gratifications
o Surveilance ‘Unseen footage of making a murderer police interview’
o Escapism
O Typical Narrative – Intro – Climax – Resolution  - Constant Climax


Favour of Dominant Ideologies
Fragility of justice system
Fragility of documentaries
Vulnerable to influence – Audience appeal + Institutional ideologies

BOOKS

Film Art: David Bordwell

42
 A documentary film purports to present factual information about the world outside the film.
43
What justifies our belief that a film is a documentary? For one thing, a documentary typically comes to us labelled as such. This in turn leads us to assume that the persons, places, and events exist and that the information presented about them is trustworthy.
Some staging as legitimate in a documentary if the staging serves the larger purpose of presenting information.
In some cases, staging may intensify the documentary value of the film.
46
Some fictional films take documentary footage and make it fictional to suit the context.
The overall purpose an dpoint of the fictional film – to present imaginary actions and events –governs how er will take even documentary footage seen within it.
O Media student share > Resources > A Level > Critical Investigation > Disability > Images of Disability in Popular Television
Images of Disability in Popular Television
‘Escaping the ‘Evil Avenger’ and the ‘Supercrip’: Images of Disability in television.

MEDIA MAGAZINE
MM56 - It’s all in the Mind: Detectives on Screen. Malcolm Hebron investigates the representations of mental illness in TV crime drama.
O ’ Series like Luther point to a serious issue in
the crime genre: the representation of mental
illness. Even though the vast majority of cases of
psychiatric illness do not lead to violent episodes,
axe-wielding madmen and scheming serial
killers are a staple of the crime genre, reinforcing
the notion that psychological disturbance is
sinister and threatening. Popular crime stories
can thus stigmatise psychiatric disorder and
give a misleading picture of the world.’


MM54 - ‘The More You Deny Me the Stronger I Get’: Trauma, Repression and Catharsis in The Babadook. Gabrielle O’Brien explores a genre-bending Gothic movie which probes the inner world of the mind.
MM38 - Attacking America: A decade of Documentary Dissent
O Horror Genre
O ‘he exhibits aggressive behavioural
tendencies that mark him as a troubled child.
When Samuel is expelled from school
for bringing in a dangerous weapon to ‘kill monsters’,

O ’forcing her to threaten
Samuel’s safety.’

O mental health and the supernatural – does it mean failing to talk about mental illnesses in texts is better than representing it as supernatural and dangerous?

ONLINE ARTICLES
O http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/what-making-a-murderer-reveals-about-the-justice-system-and-intellectual-disability-20160111
Dassey’s Lack of understanding was manipulated and rarely talked about within the show.
O Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Making_a_Murderer
‘claims that key evidence from the trial was omitted from the documentary’
‘"very one-sided" and feels that viewers are "only getting one side of the story’
‘Jodi Stachowski, a former fiancée of Avery's, defended him in the documentary. But, during an interview on HLN's Nancy Grace in January 2016, she was asked whether she believes Avery killed Halbach. She said, "Yes, I do, because he threatened to kill me and my family and a friend of mine." Stachowski also said that Avery forced her to lie to Netflix producers, threatening that otherwise she would "pay for it." She quoted other alleged hearsay comments by him.
O THREAD OF Making a Murder Articles: http://www.usatoday.com/topic/290ef6c6-a047-4dda-a9a9-977a6bc3f7e9/Making-A-Murder/

THE SHOW ITSELF
Non Linear Narrative – Constantly goes between time which the said offences occurred and the trials.
Constant Disequilibrium – Hint at equilibrium – new equilibrium is the current state – dassey being freed e.t.c.
And almost multi strand narrative – victims – accusers – family members – law people.
S1 EP1 
Penny Beerntsten - Victim of sexual assault + attempted murder in 1985
Stephen Aver was wrongfully convicted, sentence to 32 years and served 18

Strength of institutional bias (verging brainwashing like ideas)
O Denial of DNA -  The amount of people involved potentially a blind eye.

S1 EP 2 Eugene Kusche.
" My sketch looks more like Steven Avery than Gregory Allen"
In response to the reliability of DNA Testing

O Other Texts –
Orange is the New Black S4 – Poussey’s death – Piper causing Alex to remain in prison e.t.c.
http://kmest4.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/mest4-critical-investigation-to-what.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0327z4t/the-people-detective-5-maybrick

Amanda Knox – Netflix Documentary

BRENDAN DASSEY IS BEING RELEASED – CONFIRMED TUESDAY 15TH NOVEMBER
http://news.sky.com/story/judge-orders-release-of-making-a-murderers-brendan-dassey-10658177
Court documents described Mr Dassey as a slow learner who has difficulty understanding language and speaking.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3935558/Judge-orders-Making-Murderer-accomplice-Brendan-Dassey-released-10-years-prison.html
Viewers saw police officers apparently coerce Dassey - the teenager with an IQ of 70 - into confessing to the murder of Halbach along with his uncle Steven Avery.
The documentary also heavily suggested that Avery was framed for the murder by police officers with a grudge.

U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin ruled in August that investigators tricked Dassey into confessing he helped Avery with the crime

In perhaps the most shocking scene, viewers of the show had seen footage of officers pressuring Dassey, who has a mental age of nine, into a making a ‘confession’.
The boy was also shown being bullied and manipulated by his own defence team.

'The investigators got into my head saying that if I confessed they would let me go, but when I did they locked me up. They tricked me. I was afraid of them back then.’
He called the trial a ‘witch hunt’ and added: ‘The prosecutors don’t care what they do. They just want a conviction.’


Smallgreenbouncyone, here, about 7 hours ago
Derek Bentley, Tim Evans, Stefan Kizco, Barry George, The Cardiff Three, all victims of bullies and perjurors in police uniform!
TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYOaIDxirHE

Depending on the reading, Dassey could be represented as the victim, the interrogators as the villains. However it could be the complete opposite where the interrogators are the heroes seeking justice and Dassey is the villain who is not only a rapist/murderer but is trying to refrain from revealing the truth.

Stereotyping the disabled/lower class?
No lawyer – historically this is a familiar factor of miscarriages of justice where the confession has come from an interrogation where no lawyer/representation is there.

CAMERAWORK:  High angle – makes Dassey seem small and irrelevant.

(scene from documentary)

Binary opposition between – Dassey’s/Avery’s and the Law and enforcers.

The clip shows a guidance towards the confession and shows that ideas and important facts were told to Dassey and what he replied with was an extended repetition.
Regardless of whether Dassey really had an involvement or knew the facts beforehand – the fact that the officers told him results in that specific piece of evidence losing credibility as his previous knowledge cannot then be proved.

If the officers had knowledge of Dassey’s intellectual disability. It wouldn’t be too far to suggests that they would have used this to their advantage.



THE DISABLED AND THE JUSTICE SYSTEM
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/ockhamsrazor/australian-justice-system-disability-indigenous/7326240

During 2015, at least 65,000 people flowed in and out of Australian prisons. Half of these prisoners have disabilities. People with disabilities who are poor, disadvantaged, and Aboriginal are overrepresented in the prison population.

What kind of mental disabilities do we see?

Mental disabilities include disorders such as clinical depression, schizophrenia, anxiety and psychosis. People can experience these for a short time or throughout their lives.

Cognitive disability covers impairments such as intellectual disability, acquired brain injury, dementia and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. These are ongoing impairments in comprehension, reason, judgment, learning or memory.

A person with one or both of these disabilities may have poor control over their behaviour, not foresee the results of their behaviour, act on false or distorted beliefs and react impulsively in a stressful or threatening situation.

The study draws on a unique data set of over 2,700 people, a quarter of whom are Aboriginal, who have been imprisoned in New South Wales. We analysed data from police, courts, legal aid, juvenile justice and corrective services—as well as government housing, disability, health and community services.

This is in contrast to those with multiple disabilities who come from areas and families with more resources who are supported through school, health and social and private services and who rarely become enmeshed in the criminal justice system.


https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/mar/18/miscarriages-justice-history
Stefan Kiszko served 16 years in prison after being wrongly convicted of the 1975 murder of the schoolgirl Lesley Molseed in West Yorkshire. He was freed on appeal in 1992. Later, Ronald Castree's DNA was found to match samples taken from semen on the 11-year-old's clothes. He was jailed for life for the murder in 2007.
 Stephen Downing was jailed for 27 years for beating to death the typist Wendy Sewell in Bakewell. His conviction was quashed in 2002 after a campaign by the then editor of the Matlock Mercury, Don Hale, who said Downing had been interviewed without legal representation and his signed confession had been written by a police officer.
Derek Bentley, 19, was hanged for involvement in the murder of the police constable Sidney Miles in 1953. His family campaigned to clear his name, saying he had severe learning difficulties and a mental age of 11. In 1998, his conviction was overturned by the court of appeal because the trial judge had misdirected the jury on points of law.
 Judith Ward spent 18 years in jail for the IRA killing of 12 people on board an army coach on the M62 in February 1973. Her conviction was quashed in 1992 after her lawyers argued the trial jury should have been told of her history of mental illness. Three appeal court judges concluded Ward's conviction had been "secured by ambush" and that government forensic scientists withheld vital information.
Babysitter Suzanne Holdsworth spent three years in prison for murdering Kyle Fisher, a neighbour's two-year-old son, before she was cleared in a retrial last year. She had been jailed for life after being convicted in 2005 of killing the toddler by repeatedly banging his head against a wooden bannister at her Hartlepool home. The appeal court ruled her conviction was unsafe after new medical evidence emerged suggesting Kyle may have died from an epileptic seizure. She was found not guilty at the retrial.
To Kill a Mocking Bird
http://www.gradesaver.com/to-kill-a-mockingbird/q-and-a/how-is-tom-robinsons-death-related-to-the-miscarriage-of-justice-that-occurs-to-blacks-in-southern-towns-such-as-maycomb-247925

Aslan – 15/04/2015 - Tom Robinson was innocent to begin with: they did not need a trial if people only looked at the facts of the case. Unfortunately Atticus was the only person looking at the facts and he was defending a black man. The irony is that most of the town and all the jurors knew that Tom was innocent. Furthermore they knew the darker truths about what Bob Ewell did to his daughter. Sadly, the jury could not get past their own blind prejudice to uphold justice: true justice was only for white people.  Blacks were disposable to them and that is exactly how Tom Robinson ended up.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/18/mockingbird-questions-good-justice

‘All are participants within a criminal justice system with a responsibility to the truth, but who choose to ignore it in order to achieve what they consider the "right" result, based on their personal morality.’
from Amtiskaw,
ejumpcut.org
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC27folder/ReidmstOnDocy.html
Just the presence of filmmakers and their tools immediately changes reality. Unavoidably filmmakers cannot record reality "like it is." Also reality does not present itself innocently. Sometimes it is a question of political censorship. Filmmakers do not get access to everyday "realities" (workplace, schools, bureaucracies, etc.). Or if they do — through some sort of undercover investigative method — they then are faced with the TV censors. Therefore it has become more and more necessary to leave out reality or to stage it (and with the increasing pressure from the Right, it is becoming more so).
Class is an issue, too. Depending on which class we film, there are different taboos and sanctions.
Finally, the filmmakers' presence forces those who are being filmed into a role which responds to the filmmakers' expectations.
Let's assume for a moment that we had U.S. conditions in West Germany, for example, the situation of Frederick Wiseman in his film BASIC TRAINING. He obtained permission from the Army to film anything he wanted — that's unthinkable here. Yet he filmed only the surface because he didn't want to delve into the people he filmed,
His personal choice of camera angle, image size and sequence reveals a high degree of subjectivity in his perception of reality, even though he pretends to make an "objective record."
The online distribution also helped to facilitate conversation about the film



http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc53.2011/TryonWebDoc/
Greenwald helped to give form to what I am calling the transmedia documentary, a set of nonfiction films that use the participatory culture of the web to enhance the possibilities for both a vibrant public sphere cultivated around important political issues and an activist culture invested in social and political change.
This use of social media tools fits neatly into arguments about the web as a site for returning political power to citizens, and Greenwald’s film helps to illustrate how the transmedia documentary can be used to assemble and engage a mass audience, while also providing an important starting point for thinking about how discussions of new media have come to shape the cultures around documentary film.
This concept of transmedia documentary builds upon and partially reworks the nonfictional modes of representation that Bill Nichols (1991: p. 3) has associated with “the discourses of sobriety,” which operate under the assumption that non-fiction films
“can and should alter the world itself, they can effect action and entail consequences.”

Because of this focus on active audiences, the concept of transmedia documentary also builds from arguments developed by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture on the new storytelling models used by film and television producers to create a more immersive and engaging experience for active audiences

As Angelica Das (2011), writing for the Tribeca Film Festival’s “Future of Film” blog argues, “filmmakers from all genres no longer just make films.” Instead, for emerging filmmakers,
“Social documentary projects are increasingly more than social and more than documentary.”
Documentary filmmakers have often used alternative modes of distribution, and documentaries have often been connected to a larger tradition of social and political activism. In fact, Jane Gaines (2007: p. 40) has noted that contemporary anti-war documentaries involved in “the production of outrage,” including the films of Robert Greenwald and David Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir!, extend and rework “the documentary social change legacy” of Vietnam-era anti-war films, in some cases by directly depicting earlier, historical forms of mass protest. Zeiger’s Sir! No Sir!, for example, uses depictions of the anti-war movement within the U.S. military during the Vietnam War to celebrate past forms of resistance while simultaneously updating those practices for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Zeiger has done this by producing a web series in collaboration with Iraq Veterans Against the War, This is Where We Take Our Stand, which profiles a groups of Iraq War veterans who have spoken out against the war, a series that continued several years after the film was initially released.

Despite these forms of documentary activism, it is less than clear what happens once these films engage viewers. In fact, a number of critics, including Micah White (2010), have argued that online petitions, what he calls “clicktivism,” have short-circuited more demanding forms of political activity, breeding passivity rather than producing active political participants.
These forms of transmedia documentary, along with the new distribution platforms that have reshaped documentary distribution, have contributed to the emergence of a transmedia documentary culture built around a desire for audiences to view themselves as active participants, rather than passive consumers of political texts. In this context, I identify three significant distribution practices that have shaped post-9/11 documentary culture.
First, I discuss the “house party” model developed by Robert Greenwald. This approach to distribution, which has evolved alongside emerging digital technologies, has defined itself both in terms of circumventing the traditional gatekeepers of theatrical and television distribution and in terms of encouraging active, critical engagement with broadcast media through its use of various pedagogies of media criticism and analysis.
I then discuss Jeff Skoll’s Participant Productions, which produces both narrative features and documentaries about timely political topics, such as global warming (An Inconvenient Truth), food production (Food Inc), and disability issues (Murderball). Although Participant generally sponsors films designed for a limited theatrical release, mostly to art house theaters, their movies are also supplemented by websites that encourage audiences to become involved in social issues, such as ClimateCrisis.net, which sought to shape the audience response to An Inconvenient Truth. Alongside of Participant Productions, I look at Ted Leonsis’ and Rick Allen’s SnagFilms, an online distribution network that screens documentaries for free online with brief advertisements, while allowing users to “snag” those films and post them on their own websites by cutting and pasting a simple piece of code. As a result, audiences become “programmers,” capable of creating their own virtual theaters where they can curate a set of films that are important to them.
ECHO CHAMBERS?

Then, I look at Franny Armstrong’s The Age of Stupid (2009), a documentary that sought to encourage activism around the issue of climate change. The documentary itself uses the fictional trope of a futuristic archivist (played by British actor Pete Postlethwaite) looking back at how apathy over climate change led to a planet that will become virtually uninhabitable. However, the biggest strength of Armstrong’s film is her use of social media to fund, promote, and even exhibit the film through techniques such as crowdsourcing, in which a filmmaker uses the web to raise funds from a larger audience. Although these approaches entail only a limited part of a larger set of practices within a networked documentary culture, they also represent important attempts to theorize how social media tools can be used to place documentary films within a larger political community.

Finally, I examine two prominent conservative transmedia documentaries, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which advocates for intelligent design, and I Want Your Money, which calls for less government spending, in order to illustrate that many of the principles that helped sustain progressive documentary circulation, exhibition, and reception have now been adapted by fiscal and religious conservatives, many of whom experienced their own sense of cultural or political alienation with the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency in 2008. Thus, although transmedia documentaries have been understood as an alternative to broadcast news, they provide platforms for a wide range of political viewpoints, all of which may be defining themselves in opposition to the national news media, as Sarah Palin’s consistent denigration of the “lamestream media” (even while taking a paycheck from Fox News) amply illustrates. However, given the political implications of documentary, it is worth considering how transmedia storytelling is being used to imagine new forms of participation.
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC34folder/DocyEngagemtFischel.html
Anne Fischel
Documentary films are problematic. They purport to provide information about events, institutions and cultures. They organize that information, integrating and synthesizing it into a coherent picture of the world.
Documentaries awaken a desire not just for information but for insight, understanding, and intimacy. We want the camera to take us some place we haven't been and show us something we haven't seen
ESCAPISM
Much of the critical attention directed at the documentary has looked at the completed work as a text, attempting to reveal both its artistry (its constructed nature) and its interpretive bias (its point of view). I intend to take a somewhat different tack, by looking at the approaches which filmmakers take to filming, the relations and commitments which their choices reflect, and the kinds of knowledge which those relations produce.
I believe that documentary films provide one of the most powerful means we have to represent communities to one another and to address social issues and problems. Precisely for this reason, filmmakers continually need to interrogate their own practices, evaluating the appropriateness and integrity of their methods, and the effectiveness and fidelity of the films those methods produce.
Grierson evokes a central issue of documentary: the ambiguity surrounding the film's relation to the reality it purports to represent.
But scientific papers and documentary films serve a constitutive, as well as a descriptive, function. They help to construct the social reality of inquiry which, in turn, sets the guidelines for further work. When filmmakers do not integrate their intense subjective involvement in some formal way into the film, then the process of discovery is misrepresented and routinized. Such films communicate a distorted view of what knowledge is and how it is attained.

People will go into producing their content with a certain mindset and view – this could influence the reality that they show.

"We believe the magistrate judge's decision that Brendan Dassey's confession was coerced by investigators, and that no reasonable court could have concluded otherwise, is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law,

http://www.itechpost.com/articles/59906/20161130/making-murderer-latest-updates-why-steven-avery-brendan-dassey-s.htm

http://www.criminaljusticedegreesguide.com/features/10-crime-documentaries-every-law-student-should-see.html
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096257/
The Thin Blue Line 1988