Background
At age eighteen, Avery pled guilty to burglarizing a bar and was sentenced to ten months in prison. When he was twenty, Avery and another man pled guilty to animal cruelty after pouring gas and oil on Avery's cat and throwing it into a fire; Avery was sentenced to prison again for that crime. In 1985, Avery was charged with assaulting and flashing his cousin and possessing a firearm as a felon, and with the rape for which he was later exonerated. He served six years for assaulting his cousin and illegally possessing firearms, and twelve years for the rape he did not commit.
The Wisconsin Innocence Project took Avery's case and eventually he was exonerated of the rape charge. After his release from prison, Avery and his attorneys (Stephen Glynn and Walter Kelly) filed a $36 million federal lawsuit against Manitowoc County, its former sheriff, Thomas Kocourek, and its former district attorney, Denis Vogel. On October 31, 2005, the same day that Halbach went missing, state legislators passed the Avery Bill to prevent wrongful convictions. The bill has since been renamed out of respect for the Halbach family.
Read more about this topic: Steven Avery
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