Last winter, the wildly popular Netflix documentary series Making a Murderer turned a pair of Wisconsin attorneys, Dean Strang and Jerry Buting, into     celebrities. Although Strang and Buting weren’t able to spare Steven Avery from a murder conviction—he was charged after serving 18 years in prison for     an unrelated sexual assault he didn’t commit—the documentary raises significant questions about how the American justice system works.


          We generally get local moderators. About half the event is questions from the moderator, and as people come in, they’re given the opportunity to fill out     questions. The moderator picks which ones to answer, and that’s the second half. Every time we’ve done it, there are new     questions that pop up.



             Avery’s appeals were done. He now has new counsel, [Downers Grove-based] Kathleen Zellner, and a team that she’s put together that’s been working to get     his case reopened, which primarily would involve some kind of newly discovered factual or scientific evidence, or maybe jury misconduct—things that     haven’t been raised before.

How did you get involved initially?

             That was a bigger surprise to us than anything. And very awkward and embarrassing initially. But after a while, what I liked was the number of people who     wrote me and didn’t talk about how sexy Jerry Buting was, but instead, how they were inspired to consider going into a law career, and in particular,     criminal defense.



             And it’s because the trial evidence was very different. We were able to show that there were explanations for all of the things that he was trying to claim     were sinister. The DNA that was on the hood latch, their own experts testified at trial that they’d been inside the vehicle, sampling the evidence, and     then got out to open up the hood, and didn’t take off the gloves. The amount of DNA that was found on that hood latch was very small, consistent with that     kind of innocent transfer [from blood they’d found inside the car]. And our defense was that his blood had been planted in the car. There were no     fingerprints on the hood latch, which, if you were leaving your DNA, there should be.

Fri 6/3, 8 PM Chicago Theatre 175 N. State 312-462-6300thechicagotheatre.com $39.50-$95