The Staircase

After viewing the entire 13 episodes now available on Netflix, I'm horrified at the incompetence of the local agencies responsible for investigating, collecting evidence, and evaluating evidence. However you feel about the character or guilt of the accused Michael Peterson, we should all be concerned about how law enforcement, prosecutors and those involved in evaluating scientific evidence, clearly mishandled their positions of authority. By allowing us to witness the flaws in the judgement of the judicial system, I can only say that fairness was not present in this case and no that one can claim any winners. It's obvious that under the right circumstances, anyone could find themselves unable to get a fair trial. Truly riveting and well produced documentary.

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.

We FF'ed a lot between Eps 1-8, then hit Wikipedia to find out what happened with the rest of this story. This could have been told in 4-5 eps...and been much more compelling.

Reading all these reviews after I finished watching the show what I realized is that most people don't realize what the criminal justice system should be all about. It's not about deciding if Peterson is innocent or not. It is also not about what your common sense tells you about what happened. Any person who is charged with something is "not guilty" unless proven "guilty" beyond reasonable doubts. And in this particular case it was prosecutors burden to prove that. The only thing which is begging us to give attention in this series is the broken criminal justice system and the fact that the DA will go any length to put someone behind the bars. This guy had some money so he could fight against it whether he killed his wife or not. But think about this possibility: you're poor and your wife died by an accident and they think you murdered her. So they will do whatever is there to do to put you away for good. And you cannot do anything about it because you are poor. The justice system is biased and rigged against the poor. Whether we think OJ or Peterson killed their wives doesn't mean anything. The prosecutors have to prove beyond reasonable doubts that they are guilty without masterminding the evidence and/or bringing prejudicial matters as evidence. The judge was not wise enough to stop that in Petersons case which he should have stopped. It's not like we can execute some innocent people for the sake of executing a lot of guilty people. If you are not proven guilty then you are not guilty and that's the bottom line. Just because something goes along smoothly according to our common sense doesn't make them right. You have to produce evidence what matters. I agree what David said in one episode, "the absence of evidence is not same as evidence of absence". No one knows if he killed his wife except himself until you can prove otherwise by the evidence of presence. If the prosecutors went for the DNA in her clothing straight forward maybe they would have better case against him rather than fabricating with the evidence. True they could have brought some more perspectives from the prosecutors side. It would have been really interesting to see their reaction after the Deaver things came out. But overall it's an average crime documentary with not very high quality. I'll put a 8 star and encourage you to watch it if you have some time to spare.

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