Kenneth Kratz (Photo via Netflix)
The #MeToo movement touched a chord across the country and corporate America may be taking the matter seriously as it scrambles to respond to decades of ignorance, but it’s hard not to think the backlash is making inroads these days. It’s not just that Brett Kavanaugh ended up on the Supreme Court, but that it became a centerpiece of so many Midterm campaigns with mixed results. There are at least some places out there where the backlash is very real.
Into this historical moment, Mitchell Hamline Law held an event last night with Ken Kratz, best known as the prosecutor who tagged Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey with the killing of Teresa Halbach. That case became the subject of the much-hyped Making A Murderer documentary and convinced pretty much everyone in America that prosecutors are up to some seriously shady stuff. For his part, Kratz thinks the documentary left out important evidence that justified his crusade to convict Avery and Dassey.
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Unfortunately, Kratz is also the guy forced to resign from his job when a 26-year-old domestic violence victim filed a police report that Kratz had sent her 30 coercive “sexts” over the span of 3 days loaded with the implication that if she didn’t consent to a sexual relationship, Kratz might drop the case against her abuser. These allegations sparked an investigation that uncovered two more women accusing Kratz of harassment and intimidation and landed him… out of a job and settling a civil suit for an undisclosed sum and accepting a license suspension with the time-honored excuse of a “sexual addiction” and the clever corollary of a “narcissistic personality disorder” — otherwise known as “being a prosecutor.”
On the one hand, Making A Murderer was such a phenomenon that law schools see tremendous value in leveraging that excitement to get students to events. On the other hand, don’t law schools have at least some obligation to their students’ professional ethical development to not bring in industry role models who’ve pleaded no contest to a string of creepy ethical violations? Couldn’t Mitchell Hamline have just sat this one out and tried to get one of those prosecutors from Serial to talk about how they were really right all along?
Kratz may have gone to all the professional help he needed for his narcissistic disorder and be a perfectly upstanding individual today. But unless his talk is about “how I failed my obligations and how you can avoid the same” it’s hard to see much justification for this invitation.
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Joe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.