“The Innocence Industry”

On the 5th October 2023 Joel Waldman from the STS YouTube channel spoke Shawn Rech, the director and producer of Convicting A Murderer, alongside reporter Angenette Levy.

Referring to the Netflix TV show Making A Murderer – Shawn Rech stated;

I watched it I believed it

And then I read

Two weeks later

I read an article in the New Yorker written by Kathryn Schulz

Saying ‘here’s everything they left out’

And arh it was a lot – that they left out

And then I read another story, and I think Salon or Slate by Bronwen Dickey

It was about the emotional manipulation in the filmmaking of making a murderer

So I just sort of as a fan

Arh was waiting for the response piece

I said ‘boy somebodies gonna make a slap back’

And I was making a lot of money off of Making a murderer

Because when people were done

I would be on those lists of things that you might want to consider if you

If you had a hankering for more of that type of programming

So it was good for my industry

But, but when I found out how deceptive it was

I realised it’s bad for my industry

And someone’s gotta set the record straight

So it wasn’t until two years later that erm Tom Fassbender and Ken Kratz saw Making a murderer

And they characterise it as the first time someone had exposed what they call ‘the innocence industry’

Which is a cabal of journalists, attorneys and professors

Who, you know, pop people out of prison

And then win big law suits

And erm, I didn’t know I was doing that with Andrew Hale when I made, you know A Murder In The Park

But they saw it and they said ‘we trust you with our story’

Shawn Rech – Source at around 7:03 here

An online search throws up nothing regarding Tom Fassbender and/or Ken Kratz making a reference to “the innocence industry”.

Ken Kratz did state in his book;

Obsession with a convoluted case and the accused’s guilt or innocence is nothing new.

Some of us may remember Cleveland neurosurgeon Sam Sheppard who, in 1954, was convicted of killing his pregnant wife, Marilyn.

Speculation, often about facts not in evidence, ran rampant, both in the newspapers and on “new media”—at the time, television. Sheppard won a new trial as a result, and walked free.

Excerpts by Ken Kratz from his book Avery: The Case Against Steven Avery and What Making a Murderer Gets Wrong published in October 2019

Ken Kratz made no mention of “the innocence industry” in his book.

Where can the public read or listen to Tom Fassbender and Ken Kratz make reference to “the Innocence industry”?