Cost of Auto Detailing - Cars and Prices Paid - CostHelper.com Comments (78) An auto detailer uses specialized products and tools (such as a buffer) to meticulously clean, polish and protect every part of a vehicle. This generally does not include painting or body repairs, but minor cosmetic touch-ups might be included. Consumers typically have a vehicle detailed when preparing to sell it; to maintain a vintage or luxury vehicle in pristine condition; or after auto body repairs. Typical costs: A basic hand-wash and -wax with interior cleaning typically costs $20-$150,depending on the make and model of vehicle. This generally takes from 30 minutes to two hours, depending on the detailer, and might include a hand wash and chamois dry; hand waxing; vacuuming/blowing out the interior and trunk; minor bug and tar removal; cleaning the tires, rims and wheel wells; dressing the tires (applying a product that makes them look shiny, clean and new); and cleaning the windows & mirrors.

For example, CostHelper readers report paying $40-$90 for a basic wash and wax, at an average cost of $72; Mobile Works Auto Detailing[ 1 ] in Chambersburg, PA, has a wash-wax-vacuum package for $75 for a car, $100 for a mid-size truck or SUV, $125 for a full-size truck or SUV, and $150 for a full-size van or large SUV. Expect to pay $100-$300 or more for a standard auto detailing that typically takes two to five hours. The process includes the basic wash, wax and interior cleaning. It may also include clay bar cleaning[ 2 ] to remove embedded surface contamination; cleaning door jambs and wiper blades; machine buffing and polishing the exterior; cleaning all vents, gauges and knobs; cleaning and dressing/conditioning interior vinyl or leather; cleaning seatbelts, headliner, steering wheel, column and console; and degreasing and cleaning the engine compartment and underbody.

For example, CostHelper readers report paying $155-$160 for a mid-range detailing, at an average cost of $136; Shine & Style Mobile Detail[ 3 ] in Raleigh, NC, offers a Full Detail Econo Package (3.5-4.5 hours) for $195 for a car or $245 for an SUV or van. A deluxe auto detailing can cost $150-$500 or more, and can take four to 18 hours, depending on the detailer and the condition of the vehicle. The process can include every step of a full interior and exterior detailing with high-end materials and products, plus close attention to every detail, including cosmetic touch-ups. CostHelper readers report paying $150-$300 for a complete auto detailing, at an average cost of $233. Shine & Style Mobile Detail[ 4 ] in Raleigh, NC, has an Ultimate Detail package for $375 for a car or $475 for an SUV or van.

A Solid Mercedes Luxury Option With Many Options - The New York Times The New York Times New Cars |A Solid Luxury Option With a Lot of Options Search New Cars | Behind the Wheel | 2012 Mercedes-Benz Ml350 and Ml350 Bluetec A Solid Luxury Option With a Lot of Options Continue reading the main story Photo A PRIZE INSIDE Mercedes has thoroughly revised its M-Class for 2012, though upgrades to the interior are perhaps the most notable. Credit Mercedes-Benz USA EACH morning as the sun rises over Stuttgart, Mercedes-Benz executives must give thanks for the rise, fall, evolution and endurance of the S.U.V. It certainly took Mercedes a while to find its calling in this lucrative all-wheel-drive market: the original M-Class, an Alabama-built cracker barrel with the soul of a minivan, did not portend a bright future when it arrived in 1998. Five years later, Mercedes began officially importing its G-Class, né Geländewagen.

Conceived in 1979, this $75,000 Austrian off-roader had built a tiny following strictly on the gray market, with truck-loving Yankees paying well over $100,000 for used specimens. Such action-figure S.U.V.’s won many battles, but eventually lost the war: As the rough riders fell back, overrun by car-based crossovers, the market essentially fell into Mercedes’s lap. What Americans want from today’s S.U.V.’s is exactly what Mercedes is genetically programmed to provide: not armor plating and off-road prowess, just space for the family to relax in peace, along with comfort and safety. If those buyers rise to the luxury ranks, said S.U.V. must add a sprinkling of techno-treats and a leather-scented wrapper that suggests a desirable ZIP code. Continue reading the main story With this third-generation M-Class, Mercedes’s confidence that its S.U.V. values are the right ones has never been clearer. This is a subtle but enormously skilled contender in the midsize luxury class. That is, if you can forgive a price that soars with every rich schmear of options.

In looks, performance and, now, luxury, ML buyers will feel as though they’re driving a mildly downsized version of the sumptuous GL, the three-row S.U.V. that’s arguably the best of the big luxury barges. Advertisement Continue reading the main story If the two-row ML dovetails with your tastes, your family size and your credit score, the only question is how to fill ’er up: gasoline or diesel? In this corner, the ML350 4Matic will be America’s popular choice, with its 302-horsepower 3.5-liter V-6, upgraded with direct fuel injection. But after weeklong workouts with both models, I lean toward the challenger: the ML350 Bluetec 4Matic with a 240-horsepower 3-liter turbodiesel V-6. Math majors may ask why a 240-horse diesel is preferable to a 302-horse gas engine; especially when the diesel’s base price of $51,365 is $1,500 higher.

So consider another number, 455, which describes not the engine of a vintage Pontiac GTO , but the incredible torque of the Mercedes diesel. That 455 pound-feet is 55 more than last year’s ML Bluetec (horsepower has increased by 30), and it dwarfs the 273 pound-feet of the gasoline version. The diesel’s estimated economy rating of 20 miles per gallon in town and 27 on the highway also tops the 17/22 m.p.g. estimate of the premium-unleaded ML. Both models deliver power through a seamless 7-speed automatic transmission. The ingot-solid chassis is shared in part with the Jeep Grand Cherokee , a vestige of Daimler’s former ownership of Chrysler. The body, roughly an inch shorter and lower than before, adopts some of the stacked-Lego look of the E-Class sedan. The grille is upright and simplified, braced by an angular metal chin and an enlarged three-pointed star. Large, scooped-out air inlets, striped with LED lighting, have replaced demure fog lamps.

The cargo area is usefully box-shaped, bigger than you may expect, with a wide floor and little intrusion from the wheel wells. Like its big brother, the GL, the M-Class looks classy and satisfied, a sport-ute with nothing to prove. It also retains its forward-slashing C-pillars, a look that some people can’t abide — a “Russian Tonka truck,” one colleague sniffed. If it’s all a little on the conservative side, so are the suburbs the M-Class will call home. The cabin receives the more visible sprucing up, with Benz-worthy wood and leather, firm but comfortable seats and an S-Class’s worth of gizmos. Most of this costs extra, including the wood-and-leather steering wheel ($590) and soft ambient lighting ($155). Advertisement Continue reading the main story A well-designed self-parking unit uses radar to scan for available spots at up to 20 m.p.h., then neatly parallel-parks the vehicle, requiring the driver only to marvel and to brake. That feature adds $970. Do you detect a pattern? The ML’s main ergonomic upgrade has been to move an important control out of reach, at least until you want to touch it.

Mercedes’s dastardly cruise-control stalk, which drivers have been grabbing for years when they intended to use the turn signal, or vice-versa, has been relocated below the signal stalk. The ML is as smooth as Wonka’s chocolate river and as good at ferrying children. It’s as quiet as any S.U.V. I’ve tested. Even the diesel’s unobtrusive tick-tock sound, audible with the windows open, is virtually extinguished in the sealed compartment. Mercedes estimates a dead-heat 0-to-60 m.p.h. run of 7.3 seconds for either the gasoline or diesel model. That’s rather snappy performance for a vehicle that weighs more than 5,000 pounds. But the ML’s improved cornering was the real surprise, especially with the Dynamic Handling Package, which adds an adaptive air suspension, 20-inch alloy wheels and the Adaptive Curve system. As the ML swings into a curve, the system hydraulically couples its stabilizer bars, limiting how much the body can lean over. In a straight line, the wheels are freed to help tame bumps. Decoupling the bars also helps the M-Class negotiate off-road terrain.

So equipped, the ML cornered virtually as flat as a BMW X5 on a downhill run, though the Mercedes couldn’t match the BMW’s sporty, communicative steering. The diesel, naturally, thrives at very low engine speeds. And for many people, that smooth, unstressed power is ideally suited to a well-marbled S.U.V. Yet the revised gas burner has its own charms. Its newly enlarged V-6 revs with gusto to its much-higher 6,500 r.p.m. redline and responds quicker to the throttle. Either ML will tow a stout 7,200 pounds, though a special off-road package, including driver-selected modes for handling various terrains, won’t be available until the 2013 model year. Advertisement Continue reading the main story The diesel registered 27 m.p.g. for a New York-to-Boston trip. The E.P.A. estimates that the average owner of the diesel ML will spend $2,800 a year on fuel, some $450 less than for the gasoline version.

The diesel does burn through another pricey liquid: AdBlue, the urea solution that is steadily metered into the exhaust stream to neutralize smog-forming nitrogen oxides. Diesel buyers must refill the seven-gallon urea tank every 10,000 to 15,000 miles. Some dealers charge around $300 for the service, though owners can top off on their own for much less. The ML’s base price is unchanged from last year despite the upgraded powertrain and more standard equipment, including a power liftgate, heated front seats, driver’s knee air bag and LED running lamps and taillamps. Solidly equipped, the Bluetec Benz reached $65,810. But my gas-powered test car, which starts below $50,000, came with nearly $25,000 in options — half the price of the base vehicle! — for a staggering total of $74,325.

In the ML’s defense, many buyers can and will live without a lot of the extras, like the Dynamic Handling Package (a steep $5,150); night vision ($1,780), rear-seat DVD entertainment ($1,970); adaptive cruise control, lane-departure and blind-spot warnings ($2,950); three-zone climate control ($1,450), the auto-parking unit; and an all-seeing, all-knowing xenon headlight system for $1,290. Eliminating just those options would keep the price under $60,000. If you insist on splurging, you can still get the ML550 with a 4.7-liter 402-horse Biturbo V-8; it starts at $58,465. Those who want to make a truly mad dash to the ski cabin can opt for the ML63 AMG, upgraded with a 518-horse Biturbo V-8, for $95,865. A basic two-wheel-drive ML350 arrives in September.

Considering the shared genes of the Mercedes and Jeep, is an ML worth $15,000 to $25,000 more than a Grand Cherokee or, for that matter, the fine new Ford Explorer ? For a Jeep or Ford fan, a colorful adjective precedes the “no.” For a Benz loyalist, an education analogy might be in order: he may complain about the tuition, but he’s not about to take his child out of private school.  INSIDE TRACK: An E-Class wagon on steroids and stilts. A version of this review appears in print on March 25, 2012, on Page AU1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Solid Luxury Option With a Lot of Options. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe How “Making a Murderer” Went Wrong - The New Yorker How “Making a Murderer” goes wrong.

By Kathryn Schulz A private investigative project, bound by no rules of procedure, is answerable only to ratings and the ethics of its makers.CreditIllustration by Simon Prades Argosy began in 1882 as a magazine for children and ceased publication ninety-six years later as soft-core porn for men, but for ten years in between it was the home of a true-crime column by Erle Stanley Gardner, the man who gave the world Perry Mason. In eighty-two novels, six films, and nearly three hundred television episodes, Mason, a criminal-defense lawyer, took on seemingly guilty clients and proved their innocence. In the magazine, Gardner, who had practiced law before turning to writing, attempted to do something similar—except that there his “clients” were real people, already convicted and behind bars. All of them met the same criteria: they were impoverished, they insisted that they were blameless, they were serving life sentences for serious crimes, and they had exhausted their legal options.

Gardner called his column “The Court of Last Resort.” To help investigate his cases, Gardner assembled a committee of crime experts, including a private detective, a handwriting analyst, a former prison warden, and a homicide specialist with degrees in both medicine and law. They examined dozens of cases between September of 1948 and October of 1958, ranging from an African-American sentenced to die for killing a Virginia police officer after a car chase—even though he didn’t know how to drive—to a nine-fingered convict serving time for the strangling death of a victim whose neck bore ten finger marks. The man who didn’t know how to drive was exonerated, at least partly thanks to coverage in “The Court of Last Resort,” as were many others. Meanwhile, the never terribly successful Argosy also got a reprieve. “No one in the publishing field had ever considered the remote possibility that the general reading public could ever be so interested in justice,” Gardner wrote in 1951. “Argosy’s circulation began to skyrocket.” Six years later, the column was picked up by NBC and turned into a twenty-six-episode TV series.

Although it subsequently faded from memory, “The Court of Last Resort” stands as the progenitor of one of today’s most popular true-crime subgenres, in which reporters, dissatisfied with the outcome of a criminal case, conduct their own extrajudicial investigations. Until recently, the standout representatives of this form were “The Thin Blue Line,” a 1988 Errol Morris documentary about Randall Dale Adams, who was sentenced to death for the 1976 murder of a police officer; “Paradise Lost,” a series of documentaries by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky about three teen-agers found guilty of murdering three second-grade boys in West Memphis in 1993; and “The Staircase,” a television miniseries by Jean-Xavier de Lestrade about the novelist Michael Peterson, found guilty of murdering his wife in 2001. Peterson has been granted a new trial. Randall Dale Adams was exonerated a year after “The Thin Blue Line” was released. Shortly before the final “Paradise Lost” documentary was completed, in 2011, all three of its subjects were freed from prison on the basis of DNA evidence.

In the past fifteen months, this canon has grown considerably in both content and prestige. First came “Serial,” co-created by Sarah Koenig and Julie Snyder, which revisited the case of Adnan Syed, convicted for the 1999 murder of his high-school classmate and former girlfriend, eighteen-year-old Hae Min Lee. That was followed by Andrew Jarecki’s “The Jinx,” a six-part HBO documentary that, uncharacteristically for the genre, sought to implicate rather than exonerate its subject, Robert Durst. A New York real-estate heir, Durst was acquitted in one murder case, is currently awaiting trial in another, and has long been suspected in the 1982 disappearance of his wife, Kathleen Durst. The latest addition to this canon is Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’s “Making a Murderer,” a ten-episode Netflix documentary that examines the 2007 conviction of a Wisconsin man named Steven Avery. Like the prisoners featured in “The Court of Last Resort,” Avery is a poor man serving time for a violent crime that he insists he didn’t commit. The questions his story raises, however, are not just about his own guilt and innocence.

Nearly seventy years have passed since Erle Stanley Gardner first tried a criminal case before the jury of the general public. Yet we still have not thought seriously about what it means when a private investigative project—bound by no rules of procedure, answerable to nothing but ratings, shaped only by the ethics and aptitude of its makers—comes to serve as our court of last resort. If you know anything about “Making a Murderer,” you know that Steven Avery has a particularly troubling and convoluted relationship with the criminal-justice system. In July of 1985, Avery was picked up by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department after a woman named Penny Beerntsen was brutally attacked while out for a run in a Wisconsin state park. Beerntsen, who had been conscious throughout most of the attack, deliberately sought to memorize her assailant’s features, and subsequently picked Avery out of both a photo array and a live lineup. At trial six months later, Avery was found guilty and sentenced to thirty-two years in prison. He served eighteen of those before being exonerated by DNA testing, a technology not available at the time of the trial.

That DNA test also identified Beerntsen’s actual assailant: a man named Gregory Allen, who was, by then, imprisoned for another assault. This was bad news for the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department. As the public learned soon after the exoneration, local police had gone to the sheriff’s department within days after the attack to report that Allen may have been responsible; the department, convinced that it had the right man, declined to investigate. Ten years later, while serving time, Allen confessed to the assault. Again, the sheriff’s department was alerted and, again, no one acted; Avery remained in prison for another eight years. In light of this information, he filed a lawsuit against the county for thirty-six million dollars. In 2005, while the defendants in that civil suit were being deposed, Avery was arrested again—this time for the murder of a twenty-five-year-old photographer named Teresa Halbach. Four months later, his sixteen-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, was arrested as well, after he confessed to helping Avery rape and murder Halbach and burn her body. In 2007, after separate trials, both were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.

Ricciardi and Demos examine those convictions in “Making a Murderer,” and the information they present has led viewers to respond with near-universal outrage about the verdicts. Because of the pending civil litigation, the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department was supposed to have nothing to do with the Halbach investigation beyond lending any necessary equipment to the jurisdiction in charge. Yet members of the department were involved in the case at every critical juncture. One of them was allegedly left alone with Halbach’s vehicle for several hours after it was located and before Avery’s blood was discovered inside. Another found the key to Halbach’s S.U.V. in Avery’s home—in plain view, even though the property had previously been searched by other investigators six times. A third found a bullet fragment in Avery’s garage, again after the premises had been repeatedly searched. The analyst who identified Halbach’s DNA on that bullet had been instructed by a county detective to try to come up with evidence that Halbach had been in Avery’s house or garage.

Perhaps most damning, the defense discovered that a vial of Avery’s blood, on file from the 1985 case, had been tampered with; the outer and inner seal on the box in which it was kept had been broken, and the vial itself had a puncture in the top, as from a hypodermic needle. That is sobering stuff, but the most egregious misconduct shown in the documentary concerns not Avery but his nephew, Brendan Dassey—a stone-quiet, profoundly naïve, learning-disabled teen-ager with no prior criminal record, who is interrogated four times without his lawyer present. In the course of those interrogations, the boy, who earlier claimed to have no knowledge of Halbach, gradually describes an increasingly lurid torture scene that culminates in her murder by gunshot. The gun comes up only after investigators prod Dassey to describe what happened to Halbach’s head. Dassey first proposes that Avery cut off her hair, and then adds that his uncle punched her.

Finally, one of the investigators, growing impatient, says, “I’m just going to come out and ask you: Who shot her in the head?” After the confession is signed, the prosecutor calls a press conference and turns Dassey’s story into the definitive account of what happened—a travesty of justice for Dassey and Avery, given the questionable nature of the interrogation, and a terrible cruelty to the Halbach family. Dassey repeatedly recanted his confession, including in a letter to the judge and on the witness stand. But it was too late. “Put the tape of his confession in the VCR or DVD player and play it, there’s our case right there,” Halbach’s brother told the press. He was right, but he shouldn’t have been. Most people find it impossible to imagine why anyone would confess to a crime he didn’t commit, but, watching Dassey’s interrogation, it is easy to see how a team of motivated investigators could alternately badger, cajole, and threaten a vulnerable suspect into saying what they wanted to hear.

When Dassey’s mother asked him how he came up with so many details if he was innocent, he said, “I guessed.” “You don’t guess with something like this, Brendan,” she replied. “Well,” he said, “that’s what I do with my homework, too.” By chance, I have known many of the details of the Avery case since long before the release of “Making a Murderer,” because in 2007 I spoke at length with Penny Beerntsen. At the time, I was working on a book about being wrong—about how we as a culture think about error, and how we as individuals experience it—and Beerntsen, in identifying Avery as her assailant, had been wrong in an unusually tragic and consequential way. Beerntsen had also been unusual among crime victims involved in wrongful convictions in that she had instantly accepted the DNA evidence—and, with it, her mistake. “It ain’t all her fault, you know,” Avery had said at the time of his release. “Honest mistake, you know.” But Beerntsen had felt horrifically guilty.

“This might sound unbelievable,” she told me when we first talked, “but I really feel this way: the day I learned I had identified the wrong person was much worse than the day I was assaulted. My first thought was, I don’t deserve to live.” She wrote Avery a letter, apologizing to him and his family, and, concerned by the missteps and misconduct that led to his incarceration, became involved with the Innocence Project, which seeks to free the wrongfully convicted and to reform legal practices to help prevent miscarriages of justice. Given her history, Beerntsen does not need any convincing that a criminal prosecution can go catastrophically awry. But when Ricciardi and Demos approached her about participating in “Making a Murderer” she declined, chiefly because, while her own experience with the criminal-justice system had led her to be wary of certitude, the filmmakers struck her as having already made up their minds. “It was very clear from the outset that they believed Steve was innocent,” she told me. “I didn’t feel they were journalists seeking the truth.

I felt like they had a foregone conclusion and were looking for a forum in which to express it.” Buy a cartoon Ricciardi and Demos have dismissed that idea, claiming that they simply set out to investigate Avery’s case and didn’t have a position on his guilt or innocence. Yet “Making a Murderer” never provokes the type of intellectual and psychological oscillation so characteristic of Koenig and Snyder’s “Serial.” Instead, the documentary consistently leads its viewers to the conclusion that Avery was framed by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department, and it contains striking elisions that bolster that theory. The filmmakers minimize or leave out many aspects of Avery’s less than savory past, including multiple alleged incidents of physical and sexual violence. They also omit important evidence against him, including the fact that Brendan Dassey confessed to helping Avery move Halbach’s S.U.V. into his junk yard, where Avery lifted the hood and removed the battery cable. Investigators subsequently found DNA from Avery’s perspiration on the hood latch—evidence that would be nearly impossible to plant. Perhaps because they are dodging inconvenient facts, Ricciardi and Demos are never able to present a coherent account of Halbach’s death, let alone multiple competing ones.

Although “Making a Murderer” is structured chronologically, it fails to provide a clear time line of events, and it never answers such basic questions as when, where, and how Halbach died. Potentially critical issues are raised and summarily dropped; we hear about suspicious calls to and messages on Halbach’s cell phone, but these are never explored or even raised again. In the end, despite ten hours of running time, the story at the heart of “Making a Murderer” remains a muddle. Granted, real life is often a muddle, too, especially where crime is involved—but good reporters delineate the facts rather than contribute to the confusion. Despite all this, “Making a Murderer” has left many viewers entirely convinced that Avery was framed. After the documentary aired, everyone from high-school students to celebrities jumped on the “Free Avery and Dassey” bandwagon. In the weeks since, people involved in the conviction have been subjected to vicious and in some cases threatening messages from Netflix-watching strangers.

(So have people who were not involved, including the Manitowoc Police Department, a separate entity from the county sheriff’s department.) For those people, and for others close to the original case, “Making a Murderer” seems less like investigative journalism than like highbrow vigilante justice. “My initial reaction was that I shouldn’t be upset with the documentarians, because they can’t help that the public reacted the way that it did,” Penny Beerntsen said. “But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, Well, yeah, they do bear responsibility, because of the way they put together the footage. To me, the fact that the response was almost universally ‘Oh, my God, these two men are innocent’ speaks to the bias of the piece. A jury doesn’t deliberate twenty-some hours over three or four days if the evidence wasn’t more complex.” “Making a Murderer” raises serious and credible allegations of police and prosecutorial misconduct in the trials of Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey. It also implies that that misconduct was malicious. That could be true; vindictive prosecutions have happened in our justice system before and they will happen again.

But the vast majority of misconduct by law enforcement is motivated not by spite but by the belief that the end justifies the means—that it is fine to play fast and loose with the facts if doing so will put a dangerous criminal behind bars. That same reasoning, with the opposite aims, seems to govern “Making a Murderer.” But while people nearly always think that they are on the side of the angels, what finally matters is that they act that way. The point of being scrupulous about your means is to help insure accurate ends, whether you are trying to convict a man or exonerate him. Ricciardi and Demos instead stack the deck to support their case for Avery, and, as a result, wind up mirroring the entity that they are trying to discredit. Partway through “Making a Murderer,” we hear a “Dateline NBC” producer discuss the death of Teresa Halbach in disturbingly chipper tones. “This is the perfect ‘Dateline’ story,” she says. “It’s a story with a twist, it grabs people’s attention. . . .

Right now murder is hot, that’s what everyone wants, that’s what the competition wants, and we’re trying to beat out the other networks to get that perfect murder story.” That clip, presented without context, is meant to make the “Dateline” producer look shallow and exploitative, and it does. But it is also meant to inoculate Ricciardi and Demos against the charge that they, too, are pursuing a hot murder case with a dramatic twist in order to grab people’s attention. The implication is that, unlike traditional true-crime shows—“Dateline,” “48 Hours,” “America’s Most Wanted,” “Nancy Grace”—their work is too intellectually serious to be thoughtless, too morally worthy to be cruel. Yet the most obvious thing to say about true-crime documentaries is something that, surprisingly often, goes unsaid: they turn people’s private tragedies into public entertainment. If you have lost someone to violent crime, you know that, other than the loss itself, few things are as painful and galling as the daily media coverage, and the license it gives to strangers to weigh in on what happened.

That experience is difficult enough when the coverage is local, and unimaginable when a major media production turns your story into a national pastime. “Sorry, I won’t be answering any questions because . . . TO ME ITS REAL LIFE ,” the younger brother of Hae Min Lee, the murder victim in “Serial,” wrote on Reddit in 2014. “To you listeners, its another murder mystery, crime drama, another episode of CSI. You weren’t there to see your mom crying every night . . . and going to court almost every day for a year seeing your mom weeping, crying, and fainting. You don’t know what we went through.” Like the Lee family, the Halbachs and Penny Beerntsen declined to participate in a journalistic investigation into their personal tragedies. But no one in such a situation has any real way to opt out. “Making a Murderer” takes Halbach’s death as its subject (her life is represented by a few photos and video clips, which do not rise above the standard mise en scène of murder shows), and footage of her family appears in almost every episode.

Beerntsen, for her part, was dismayed to discover that the filmmakers had obtained a photograph of her battered face from the 1985 attack and used it without her knowledge. “I don’t mind looking at it, but my children should not have to relive that,” she said. “And everything we’re dealing with, the Halbachs are dealing with a thousandfold.” This is not to suggest that reporting on violence is always morally abhorrent. Crimes themselves vary widely, as does crime coverage, and it is reasonable to hold that at some point the demands of private grief are outweighed by the public good. But neither “Serial” (which is otherwise notable for its thoroughness) nor “Making a Murderer” ever addresses the question of what rights and considerations should be extended to victims of violent crime, and under what circumstances those might justifiably be suspended. Instead, both creators and viewers tacitly dismiss the pain caused by such shows as collateral damage, unfortunate but unavoidable. Here, too, the end is taken to justify the means; someone else’s anguish comes to seem like a trifling price to pay for the greater cause a documentary claims to serve.

But what, exactly, is that cause in “Making a Murderer”? As of January 12th, more than four hundred thousand people had signed a petition to President Obama demanding that “Steven Avery should be exonerated at once by pardon.” That outrage could scarcely have been more misdirected. For one thing, it was addressed to the wrong person: Avery was convicted of state crimes, not federal ones, and the President does not have the power to pardon him. For another, it was the wrong demand. “Making a Murderer” may have presented a compelling case that Avery (and, more convincingly, Dassey) deserved a new trial, but it did not get anywhere close to establishing that either one should be exonerated. The petition points to another weakness of “Making a Murderer”: it is far more concerned with vindicating wronged individuals than with fixing the system that wronged them. The series presents Avery’s case as a one-off—a preposterous crusade by a grudge-bearing county sheriff’s department to discredit and imprison a nemesis.

(Hence the ad-hominem attacks the show has inspired.) But you don’t need to have filed a thirty-six-million-dollar suit against law enforcement to be detained, denied basic rights, and have evidence planted on your person or property. Among other things, simply being black can suffice. While Avery’s story is dramatic, every component of it is sadly common. Seventy-two per cent of wrongful convictions involve a mistaken eyewitness. Twenty-seven per cent involve false confessions. Nearly half involve scientific fraud or junk science. More than a third involve suppression of evidence by police. Those statistics reflect systemic problems. Eyewitness testimony is dangerously persuasive to juries, yet it remains admissible in courts almost without caveat. Some interrogation methods are more likely than others to produce false confessions, yet there are no national standards; fewer than half of states require interrogations to be videotaped, and all of them allow interrogators to lie to suspects. With the exception of DNA evidence (which emerged from biology, not criminology), forensic tests are laughably unscientific; no independent entity exists to establish that such tests are reliable before their results are admissible as evidence.

It is largely because of these systemic weaknesses in our judicial system that we find ourselves with a court of last resort. While that court cannot directly operate the levers of the law, it has drawn attention to cases that need review, and innocent people have been freed as a result. Yet in the decades since Erle Stanley Gardner launched his column, none of the forces that put those people in prison in the first place have changed for the better. Nor have we evolved a set of standards around extrajudicial investigations of criminal cases. However broken the rules that govern our real courts, the court of last resort is bound by no rules at all. That does not automatically compromise independent investigations into crime; some remarkable and important work has been done in the tradition of the court of last resort. But it does enable individual journalists to proceed as they choose, and the choices made by Ricciardi and Demos fundamentally undermine “Making a Murderer.” Defense attorneys routinely mount biased arguments on behalf of their clients; indeed, it is their job to make the strongest one-sided case they can. But that mandate is predicated on the existence of a prosecution. We make moral allowances for the behavior of lawyers based on the knowledge that the jury will also hear a strong contrary position.

No such structural protection exists in our extrajudicial courts of last resort, and Ricciardi and Demos chose not to impose their own. Toward the end of the series, Dean Strang, Steven Avery’s defense lawyer, notes that most of the problems in the criminal-justice system stem from “unwarranted certitude”—what he calls “a tragic lack of humility of everyone who participates.” Ultimately, “Making a Murderer” shares that flaw; it does not challenge our yearning for certainty or do the difficult work of helping to foster humility. Instead, it swaps one absolute for another—and, in doing so, comes to resemble the system it seeks to correct. It is easy to express outrage, comforting to have closure, and satisfying to know all the answers. But, as defense lawyers remind people every day, it is reasonable to doubt. ♦ Kathryn Schulz joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” her story on the seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest.

The Drone Zone - The New York Times The New York Times Continue reading the main story Holloman Air Force Base, at the eastern edge of New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range, 200 miles south of Albuquerque, was once famous for the daredevil maneuvers of those who trained there. In 1954, Col. John Paul Stapp rode a rocket-propelled sled across the desert, reaching 632 miles per hour, in an attempt to figure out the maximum speed at which jet pilots could safely eject. He slammed on the brakes and was thrust forward with such force that he had to be hauled away on a stretcher, his eyes bleeding from burst capillaries. Six years later, Capt. Joseph Kittinger Jr., testing the height at which pilots could safely bail out, rode a helium-powered balloon up to 102,800 feet. He muttered, “Lord, take care of me now,” dropped for 13 minutes 45 seconds and broke the record for the highest parachute jump. Today many of the pilots at Holloman never get off the ground. The base has been converted into the U.S.

Air Force’s primary training center for drone operators, where pilots spend their days in sand-colored trailers near a runway from which their planes take off without them. Inside each trailer, a pilot flies his plane from a padded chair, using a joystick and throttle, as his partner, the “sensor operator,” focuses on the grainy images moving across a video screen, directing missiles to their targets with a laser. Holloman sits on almost 60,000 acres of desert badlands, near jagged hills that are frosted with snow for several months of the year — a perfect training ground for pilots who will fly Predators and Reapers over the similarly hostile terrain of Afghanistan. When I visited the base earlier this year with a small group of reporters, we were taken into a command post where a large flat-screen television was broadcasting a video feed from a drone flying overhead. It took a few seconds to figure out exactly what we were looking at. A white S.U.V. traveling along a highway adjacent to the base came into the cross hairs in the center of the screen and was tracked as it headed south along the desert road. When the S.U.V. drove out of the picture, the drone began following another car.

“Wait, you guys practice tracking enemies by using civilian cars?” a reporter asked. One Air Force officer responded that this was only a training mission, and then the group was quickly hustled out of the room. Photo An MQ-9 Reaper above Holloman. Credit Sean Hemmerle for The New York Times Though the Pentagon is increasing its fleet of drones by 30 percent and military leaders estimate that, within a year or so, the number of Air Force pilots flying unmanned planes could be higher than the number who actually leave the ground, much about how and where the U.S. government operates drones remains a secret. Even the pilots we interviewed wore black tape over their nametags. The Air Force, citing concerns for the pilots’ safety, forbids them to reveal their last names. Continue reading the main story It is widely known that the United States has three different drone programs. The first is the publicly acknowledged program run by the Pentagon that has been operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. The other two are classified programs run separately by the C.I.A. and the military’s Joint Special Operations Command, which maintain separate lists of people targeted for killing.

Advertisement Continue reading the main story Over the years, details have trickled out about lethal drone operations in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen and elsewhere. But the drone war has been even more extensive. According to three current and former intelligence officials I spoke to, in 2006, a barrage of Hellfire missiles from a Predator hit a suspected militant camp in the jungles of the Philippines, in an attempt to kill the Indonesian terrorist Umar Patek. The strike, which was reported at the time as a “Philippine military operation,” missed Patek but killed others at the camp. The increased use of drones in warfare has led the Air Force to re-engineer its training program for drone pilots. Trainees are now sent to Holloman just months after they join the military, instead of first undergoing traditional pilot training as they did in the past. The Air Force can now produce certified Predator and Reaper pilots in less than two years. But the accelerated training has created its own problems. When I visited Holloman in February, there had been five drone accidents at the base since 2009. Most of them occurred during landing, when pilots have the most difficulty judging where the plane is in relation to the runway.

As much as the military has tried to make drone pilots feel as if they are sitting in a cockpit, they are still flying a plane from a screen with a narrow field of vision. Photo Inside a trailer at Holloman from which pilots remotely fly the drones. Credit Sean Hemmerle for The New York Times Then there is the fact that the movement shown on a drone pilot’s video screen has over the years been seconds behind what the drone sees — a delay caused by the time it takes to bounce a signal off a satellite in space. This problem, called “latency,” has long bedeviled drone pilots, making it difficult to hit a moving target. Last year senior operatives with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula told a Yemeni reporter that if they hear an American drone overhead, they move around as much as possible. (Military officials said that they have made progress in recent years in addressing the latency problem but declined to provide details.) Stationing pilots in the United States has saved the Air Force money, and pilots at Holloman who have flown drone combat missions speak glowingly about a lifestyle that allows them to fight a war without going to war. Craig, an Air Force captain who is a trainer at the base, volunteered to fly Predators while in flight school.

He calls his job “the perfect balance of mission and family.” And yet this balance comes at a cost. Pilots have flown missions over Afghanistan in the morning, stopped for lunch, fought the Iraq war in the afternoon and then driven home in time for dinner. Lt. Col Matt Martin, formerly a trainer at Holloman, wrote about the disorienting experience of toggling among different war zones in a memoir, “Predator,” calling the experience “enough to make a Predator pilot schizophrenic.” It’s disorienting in other ways too. Can a pilot who flies planes remotely ever be as heroic as the aces who flew behind enemy lines or as Colonel Stapp, whose stunt in the New Mexico desert won him a prestigious medal for valor and put him on the cover of Time magazine? Luther (Trey) Turner III, a retired colonel who flew combat missions during the gulf war before he switched to flying Predators in 2003, said that he doesn’t view his combat experience flying drones as “valorous.” “My understanding of the term is that you are faced with danger.

And, when I am sitting in a ground-control station thousands of miles away from the battlefield, that’s just not the case.” But, he said, “I firmly believe it takes bravery to fly a U.A.V.” — unmanned aerial vehicle — “particularly when you’re called upon to take someone’s life. In some cases, you are watching it play out live and in color.” As more than one pilot at Holloman told me, a bit defensively, “We’re not just playing video games here.” Mark Mazzetti is a national-security correspondent for The Times. He is currently writing a book about the C.I.A. since 9/11. Best High Rated Used Vehicles - Highest Rated 4x4 Trucks and 4WD SUVs - Buying Tips for Used Cars Ford Explorer Honda CRV Dec 17 2006 Top SUVs and Pickup Trucks Here are the best rated used SUVs and Pickup Trucks, recommended by a number of top expert sources. (The worst rated SUVs and Trucks are here .) These are so highly rated, you shouldn't hesitate about buying one of these used vehicles.

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