"Making a Murderer" directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos continued to defend their documentary series Monday night on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah." The two told Noah how they did not intend for the topic of conversation around the series to be specifically about Steven Avery, but instead the issues of the American justice system.
"We did not intend to have an impact on that particular case," Ricciardi told Noah. "Our objective really was - you know with 20/20 hindsight we can look back at the first case, we knew that the justice system had failed Steven Avery in 1985 and continued to fail him for another 18 years while he was wrongly imprisoned. What we really wanted to explore and understand the extent to which the justice system had made meaningful progress since 1985."
While the documentary makers could not deny that there had been progress made like DNA and legislative reform, there is still a long way to go "before we can have a reliable system," according to Demos.
Ricciardi and Demos spent 10 years of their life documenting the case of Avery. The two were finishing up grad school at Colombia University when they learned of the case. Avery was convicted of sexual assault in 1985 and was sentenced to 36 years in prison. He was exonerated in 1985 when DNA evidence proved he did not commit the crime. Avery was a free man for two years and was arrested yet again in 2005, this time for the murder of 25-year-old photographer Teresa Halbach.
"We did not set out to prove Steven Avery's innocence, he did," Ricciardi said. "We were documenting what he was doing and what his defense was doing in terms of responding to efforts the state was putting forth to try and convict him."
Check out the full interview below:
