Steven Avery Won't Be Getting Out Of Prison: Judge

MILWAUKEE, WI- People around the world became compulsive followers of the saga of convicted Manitowoc County killers Steven Avery and his nephew Brendan Dassey since "Making a Murderer" appeared on Netflix in December 2015. Over these past two years, Downers Grove, Illinois, wrongful conviction attorney Kathleen Zellner took up Avery's case, vowing to prove that Avery was framed for the Halloween 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach and that the real killer was still at large. On Tuesday, the wind was let out of their sails by Sheboygan County judge Angela Sutkiewicz. The special judge appointed to oversee Avery's post-conviction filings in neighboring Manitowoc County rejected Avery's bid for a new trial. The timing of Tuesday's ruling was a complete surprise.

Many legal observers had figured it would be several more months before the Wisconsin judge began to analyze the evidence, but that apparently was not the case.

The Wisconsin judge did not find the more than 1,200-page post-conviction filing submitted by Zellner back in June a convincing enough document to persuade her to overturn Avery's 2007 murder conviction and give Avery, now 55, a new trial. Sutkiewicz also made her ruling without even granting Zellner the chance to have an evidence hearing inside a Wisconsin courtroom.

"The reports submitted by the defendant were equivocal in their conclusions and do not establish an alternate interpretation of the evidence," the judge wrote in her six-page ruling, according to the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin article. "Given the totality of evidence submitted at trial and the ambiguous conclusions stated in the experts' reports, it cannot be said that a reasonable probability exists that a different result would be reached at a new trial based on these reports."

On Tuesday afternoon, Patch spoke with Zellner by phone from Seattle. She said Tuesday's ruling by the Sheboygan judge should not be viewed as a major setback for her and her client. Zellner said she and the Wisconsin Attorney General's Office recently worked out an agreement to allow for additional physical evidence testing upon the RAV4 of murder victim Halbach, and the judge apparently did not know this at the time she decided to move forward and issue her ruling against Avery.

"It's not really a big deal," Zellner said of Tuesday's decision. "We'll be submitting a motion to vacate the order because we have an agreement reached between both parties and the judge assumed that all the scientific evidence had been submitted. We'll have more scientific evidence as well as new witness affidavits that we'll be submitting before Thanksgiving."

Photos via Illinois Patch Editor John Ferak