The Staircase

I went through a similar ordeal with law enforcement and the assistant DA that wanted to win a promotion to DA. My son was accused of a crime that he did not do and they had zero evidence and and he had never had any brush with the legal system but they wanted a good case that would make headlines. I had always trusted the law enforcement system and believed you are innocent until proven guilty but it the opposite. You are guilty and we had to spend $247,000 on legal costs before he was found not guilty by a jury of 12. The state wasted so much money and we are still paying off those we borrowed money from and he was also on 3rd party for a whole year. It was over four years ago now but I still suffer from depression and anxiety from this horrible, unbelievable failure of our legal system. I will never trust it again nor will any of my family. I don't even care whether Michael Peterson is guilty or innocent. Just the lies and misconduct of the procsecution team was glaring and oh so familar. They , too, did not care if he was guilty or innocent: they just wanted to win. Instead, everybody lost. The hundreds of thousands of dollars the state spent could have been spent on public "pretenders" for those pitiful prisoners that came into court chained together and their only choice was a plea bargain, which always meant guilty

I wont go over the whole story here as many other have already done so. Yes, this is a tragic story and has some interesting twists. Yes, I feel that justice was not well served for this whole investigation and trial. However, this 13 episode series could have easily been edited down to 6 or 7 episodes. There is SO much fluff. There are SO many scenes that drag on or rehash the same info. The characters are just not that interesting to hear them go on and on. They even have drawn out scenes of cars parking or driving away or people walking...nothing going on. No drama. No storytelling. No point. It makes a slow story feel a LOT slower.

A good story kinda ruined by Netflix. Drags on for what seems like an eternity & i lost interest. I just ended up asking a friend how it ended.

If you want to watch a police documentary don't watch this one because the mystery is still here (even though there are certain theories going around on the internet, I'll let you look by yourself).

This documentary is about a broken justice system that doesn't allow the defendant the fair ability to defend themselves. The State is the prosecution so why would they handle themselves all the evidence? It needs an unbiased third party to handle such evidence. Politics come into play in all aspect of society and it's just sad that it also colors the justice system, which should be politic-free and unbiased, always.

I found this to be a very captivating documentary. I didn't find it to be too long like other reviewers mentioned but I will agree that it is somewhat biased. I've never seen a doc that goes into as much detail as this one did. If you enjoy watching lawyers argue and try to prove their points to a jury then you will definitely enjoy this.