Making a Murderer subject Steven Avery’s new attorney, Kathleen Zellner, gave an extensive interview to Newsweek magazine recently in which she makes a surprising new claim about the adequacy of Avery’s trial lawyers, Jerry Buting and Dean Strang.
In the interview, Zellner went into greater details on claims that she had previously alluded to in cryptic tweets over the past several months, telling the magazine that she has identified new suspects that were overlooked during the previous investigation into the death of Teressa Halbach. Zellner said a review of Halbach’s phone records revealed that she made a couple of phone calls in the days before her death to a man with a record of sex abuse crimes in Arizona.
The most shocking revelation in the interview, however, is that Zellner blames Avery’s trial lawyers, Buting and Strang, for overlooking critical information in the phone records during his trial.
“They screwed it up,” Zellner said.
Buting and Strang have been almost universally praised for their work on Avery’s behalf at his trial, so some might find this criticism a little surprising, but this is a fairly standard tactic used by lawyers in criminal appeals.
In fact, when Newsweek reached out to Strang for comment on the matter he did not seem bothered by it at all.
“That she is criticizing some aspects of the work I did at trial means that she is doing her job,” Strang said.
According to the report, Buting declined to comment on the matter except to say, “I continue to hope that Steven Avery gets a new trial.”
[h/t Business Insider; image via screengrab]
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