This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 29th, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The documentary series Making a Murderer presents substantial questions about how criminal investigators and prosecutors do their jobs in ways

that sometimes do not serve justice. I recently spoke with Tim Lynch, director of

Cato's Project on Criminal Justice and Sean Armbrust, the Executive Director of the Mid-Atlantic

Innocence Project, to discover what viewers should take away from the Making a Murderer

series. The documentary is about a man named Stephen Avery who is involved with the criminal justice system

remarkably with two cases. The first case he's accused of attacking a woman and

he is convicted of that crime and serves 18 years in prison before DNA

evidence shows that he was innocent of that crime and he's exonerated and gets out of prison.

And there's a lot of attention then focused on that miscarriage of justice,

how the system could have gone wrong, and then the series takes another turn where he is accused of a second crime, or even more horrendous crime of murdering a young woman.

And he is back in the criminal justice system, asserting his his innocence and the documentary goes

through his trial and raises questions about whether or not he's guilty of that

second crime. I think that's a fair summary and I think what has really captivated people

it's a couple of different things. First of all I think there's a perception

out there that the criminal justice system primarily traffics uncertainty.

And so there's this idea that most of these cases are fairly clear cut and the right answer

is readily apparent.

And that's not usually true.

You know, many cases are clear cut.

There are many guilty pleas in the system,

...