As we reported, Steven Avery‘s former fianc├â┬⌐e dramatically changed her tune about whether or not she believes her ex is guilty.
ICYMI, Jodi Stachowski‘s interview for Nancy Grace‘s HLN show aired Wednesday night, and she adamantly expressed that she feels the Making A Murderer subject is “not innocent.”
Related: Steven’s Loving All The Support!
On Thursday, Jerry Buting — one of Steven’s defense attorneys from the Netflix docu-series — discredited her new claims and STILL believes the 53-year-old is telling the truth, opening up to Rolling Stone:
“Realize that there was a fair amount of coverage with Jodi [in the documentary]. She was getting a lot of pressure, even while the trial was going on, to try and turn her away from Steven Avery. It’s many years, who knows what kind of pressure and influences have been exerted against her to try and make express that kind of opinion.”
He continued to say that what really matters is her opinion from the time of the trial, adding:
“Bottom line is that when things were contemporaneous, happening back during that time, she did not have that opinion. She was very supportive of him. So, why is she changing her opinion? I don’t know at this point.”
However, in her sit-down, Jodi claimed that the only reason she had been standing by her man was because he “used to beat” her, and told her she had to “make him look good” in the doc “or else.”
But Jerry doesn’t believe his old client’s former flame can really be taken at face value regarding these allegations, saying:
“I think that the documentary showed that she was not going to be a reliable witness. She was not called at trial in part because of that ├óΓé¼ΓÇ¥ because she had been arrested three times by the police and interviewed to try and get her to change her story and she never did. Of course, she was in jail at the time on her own drunk driving case. So she wasn’t a direct witness, although she did talk to him on the phone twice on that same night and noted nothing out of the ordinary, like [for instance that], he somehow stopped in the middle of a rape, murder, dismemberment, burning of a body, and came in and had two 15-minute phone calls with her and acted perfectly normal.”
He also addressed skeptics who are wondering why Steven didn’t testify during the trial, considering he was openly declaring his innocence, explaining:
“Sometimes people don’t testify for a whole lot of other reasons, including when a defendant testifies, sometimes what happens is the jury has a tendency to sort of weigh the defendant’s testimony against the state’s case and say ‘Which is more believable or plausible?’ and base their verdict on that when, in fact, the law says you’re not supposed to weigh the defense against the prosecution.”
He continued:
“On the other hand, if a defendant doesn’t get to testify, people are like, ‘Well, why not? What does he have to hide?’ The bottom line is that they have a constitutional right not to testify. It’s the state’s burden to prove the case without using a defendant, and that goes back to the founding of our republic. And the jury is instructed in that regard, that they are not supposed to hold that against them.”
Jerry also dished about whether or not he and Dean Strang — Steven’s other lawyer from the Netflix series — will team up once again to help him in his appeal, saying:
“There’s an attorney who has been speaking with him, and did a press release saying that she was going to be taking over the case. I have not spoken to her, nor him, so I don’t know if that’s really the case, and if that will continue to be the case. We will try, and we’ve been sort of informal advisors.”
He clarified that the appeal attorney is not usually the same one who worked the initial trial, but wasn’t sure how he or his former partner would be involved in the future.
[Image via HLN/Getty Images.]
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