Netflix's Making a Murderer Exposes Flaws That Go Far Beyond Steven Avery's Trial

By German Lopez, Vox

13 January 16

 

etflix's Making a Murderer has, for many, led to just one question: Is Steven Avery innocent? This has been the focus of the discussion surrounding the documentary series, which follows a Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, man who was wrongly convicted of an attempted murder and rape he didn't commit, exonerated after 18 years, and then tried for another crime — a murder — and sentenced to life in prison.

But the focus on Avery's guilt or innocence misses what the docu-series really achieves: It exposes the American criminal justice system's biggest weakness. For all the surprise and talk about Avery's case as an individual, extreme case, the series shows what are systemic problems in the US justice system — particularly, the system's total lack of accountability.

In Avery's case, there are plenty of areas where red flags should have led the process to pause — but didn't. Avery's previous false conviction for crimes he didn't commit and the evidence that police and prosecutors neglected in that case. The police and prosecution's insistence on going after Avery and his nephew, Brendan Dassey, for the murder of Teresa Halbach. The questionable — and perhaps planted — evidence. The seemingly coerced, potentially false confession from Dassey. (More on all of this here.)

As noted in Making a Murderer, even the state watchdog group for local police agencies concluded that there had been no wrongdoing for Avery's prior false conviction. A man was wrongly sentenced to 18 years in prison, and the official conclusion was that everything was fine.

Yet somehow, this isn't too surprising. Time and time again, I've seen similar cases around the country, in which people face wrongful convictions or smaller abuses at a truly endemic level. Often, it's rare anyone is there to prevent or stop the abuse and neglect that allows these types of cases to happen — at least until someone spends decades, or perhaps his or her entire life, in prison.

Abuse and neglect are frighteningly common in the criminal justice system

Here are just a few examples from the past several years, taken from the 125 total exonerations by courts in 2014:

1. Glenn Ford of Louisiana was wrongly sentenced to death row for 30 years for a murder he didn't commit before he was finally exonerated. There was always evidence that could have acquitted Ford, but officials ignored it during trial. Marty Stroud, the prosecutor in Ford's case, even admitted as much in a letter to the local newspaper: "In 1984, I was 33 years old. I was arrogant, judgmental, narcissistic and very full of myself. I was not as interested in justice as I was in winning."


2. Daniel Larsen of California was wrongly convicted of possessing a concealed weapon in 1999, serving nearly 15 years of a 28-years-to-life sentence before he was exonerated. Police claimed they saw Larsen throw a knife after receiving a 911 call about a fight in a parking lot, even though he didn't fit the description given by the 911 caller. Then a cop changed his testimony to make the charge stick. Finally, Larsen's trial lawyer — who was later disbarred — failed to investigate the case before trial and overlooked evidence that may have helped him.


3. Michelle Murphy of Oklahoma was wrongly convicted of killing her 15-week-old son in 1995. A detective, who had been involved in a false confession in another case, extracted a false confession from Murphy. A forensic analyst also wrongly testified that Type AB blood found at the scene couldn't rule out Murphy as the culprit, even though she is Type A and her baby was Type O. Before her exoneration, she served nearly 20 years, and her daughter was put up for adoption while she was in prison.

Again, these are only three of the 125 exonerations handed out in 2014, out of nearly 1.6 million prisoners in the US that year. But you could pull out any of these 125 cases and find some outrageous facts — the criminal justice system doesn't give a wrongful conviction unless something goes wrong along the way, after all.

Still, consistent themes run through these cases: A horrific crime, police and prosecutors eager to get a conviction so they can say they solved a crime, and a system that didn't hold law enforcement officials accountable, or put proper checks on them, to prevent a wrongful conviction that led to sometimes decades in prison.

Chances are, too, that the record 125 exonerations in 2014 represent only a fraction of the innocent people in prison that year. Advocates, after all, say the exoneration count is going up not because the justice system is getting worse but because technology, like the internet, has made it easier to shine a light on wrongful convictions.

The law enforcement officials in these cases were not necessarily evil or corrupt. They likely thought they had the right culprits. But police and prosecutors, as in Ford and Larsen's cases, were pushed to pursue a conviction, even if it meant ignoring evidence or changing a statement. The system, after all, rewards police officers and prosecutors for locking up supposedly bad people, not for doing a proper investigation and letting the wrongly accused go free.

Looking back at Avery's case, Making a Murderer suggests that the Manitowoc County Sheriff's Office and prosecutors went after Avery for the murder of Teresa Halbach, which landed him in prison in 2007, because of a personal vendetta — rooted in the embarrassment they faced after Avery was exonerated of the previous rape and attempted murder.

But there's another explanation: After Halbach's murder gained public attention, both police and prosecutors realized they needed to prove to media and the public they could solve this case. So when the evidence pointed to Avery, they went after him in full force to show they were tough on crime. Even if cops planted evidence, as Making a Murderer suggests, this could have been out of the genuine belief that they had the right guy — and wanted to guarantee they landed a conviction the public so desired.

This is not to detract from wrongdoing and abuse perpetuated by individuals in these cases. Obviously, they're culpable for their own bad behavior. The point, instead, is to shine light on how the criminal justice system pushes people to act badly — and does little to hold them accountable when they mess up.

No one holds most of the justice system accountable

Ultimately, the fundamental problem in all of these cases is there's no solid measure of accountability in the justice system.

For one, the system that deals with the most scrutiny from lawmakers, the media, and the public — the federal system — is actually a small fraction of the overall US justice system. Federal prisoners made up just 13 percent of all US inmates in 2014, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. But barring a major scandal or police shooting, it's the federal system that tends to get a lot of attention.

"The local level operates below the radar," John Pfaff, a professor at the Fordham University School of Law, said, pointing to the role of enormously powerful local prosecutors. "No one has any oversight for them, outside of the four states where [prosecutors] are appointed. There's no one to step in and say, 'You're doing a bad job, you're fired.' Unless voters decide to step in and vote this person out, there's very little accountability."

Pfaff argued that people tend to underestimate the importance of the local system. For example, more than 530,000 people have signed two petitions asking President Barack Obama to pardon Avery — even though Obama's pardon powers are limited to federal crimes, and Avery is a state convict. It seems like a case of people assuming the federal system holds all the power when, in fact, the local and state systems do.

There are supposed to be some checks on the criminal justice at all levels, from the smallest town's jail to the biggest federal penitentiary. But often, these just aren't sufficient to catch even some of the major abuses by law enforcement.

The first safeguard to an overzealous police department or prosecutor, for example, is supposed to be a person's right to an attorney. But in the US, it's safe to describe legal representation as a two-tier system: Someone either hires an attorney with plenty of expertise and a big staff, or he or she gets a public defender who is often overworked and underresourced.

A 2009 study by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, for example, found that part-time public defenders in New Orleans are effectively limited to seven minutes per case on average for all types of cases. This isn't enough time to provide an adequate defense to the thousands of clients they receive. (Making a Murderer reveals the hit-or-miss nature of public or appointed legal counsel: Dassey's publicly appointed attorneys were, overall, much worse than Avery's privately hired attorneys; the documentary series even showed evidence that one of Dassey's attorneys seemed to conspire against him.)

The courts, too, are supposed to enforce some accountability, but often they have the incentive to lean on a guilty verdict. For example, in most states, judges are elected, typically under tough-on-crime messages. This puts pressure on them to ensure that someone who could be — not necessarily is — a dangerous criminal is locked up for a long time. After all, if that person is freed and goes on to commit another crime, the judge would be one of the first people blamed.

This is not a theoretical: In previous cases, parole and pardon decisions have led to an ex-offender getting out of prison and committing another crime, leading to public outrage. In Massachusetts, for instance, the parole board released a man who went on to kill a cop during an armed robbery in 2010. These types of cases create fear all across the justice system, making the default action to keep people in prison or jail, regardless of whether they are a threat to the public.

Another level of oversight comes from state and federal watchdog agencies that are supposed to investigate abuse and misconduct in lower-level law enforcement. Often, however, the agencies are horribly understaffed, and they couldn't possibly address all the mistakes that go on in the system. As Jonathan Smith, a law professor at the University of the District of Columbia, told the Huffington Post, "It's important for the [US Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division], with limited resources, to make decisions that are strategic and not only just go to where it's bad, because there's a lot of places in this country where policing is bad and where intervention is necessary."

What about the media? It can expose some cases — Netflix, for one, gave a very big audience to Avery's case. But tens of millions of cases go through the US court system each year. The media can't possibly go through all of these cases and hold every single action by law enforcement accountable.

The final say may in fact fall on voters. But even the electoral system seems to fail to hold local officials accountable for problems. Consider prosecutors, who decide what charges — and therefore potential punishment — people face, whether people face charges at all, and, typically, the terms of a plea agreement if a defendant wants to avoid trial.

Yet when it's time to hold prosecutors accountable, voters by and large don't turn out, don't have a choice, or vote for the incumbent. In nearly 1,000 elections between 1996 and 2006 analyzed by Ronald Wright at the Wake Forest University School of Law, 95 percent of incumbent prosecutors won reelection and 85 percent ran unopposed in general elections.

If prosecutors do face any pressure, it's usually to be tough on crime — meaning lock up as many people as possible. Moira Demos, one of the creators of Making a Murderer, noted this flaw in the system in an interview with Vox's Todd VanDerWerff: "The public cares about prosecutors' conviction rates. It's about winning the trial." But this effectively encourages prosecutors to land a conviction no matter what — even if the facts of a case may change, as occurred in some of the exoneration cases noted above.

The result of all these gaps: Much of the criminal justice system faces little to no oversight, and the incentives that do exist encourage officials to convict as many criminals as possible, not necessarily get to the truth of a situation.

Now, it's not realistic to expect that every mistake in the American justice system be caught. The US is a very big country with a fragmented criminal justice system, and mistakes will happen. But as it stands, the system is built to make mistakes, despite sometimes huge indicators that something is wrong.

How can this change?

There is no easy answer to fixing this mess, but there are some ideas.

For one, voters could take law enforcement elections more seriously. Prosecutors, for instance, are tremendously powerful — Pfaff's study found that prosecutors drove mass incarceration in the 1990s and 2000s by filing more charges even as arrests fell. Yet, as shown in Ronald Wright's research, voters rarely hold prosecutors accountable.

"It's an unsatisfying solution," Pfaff said. "We're all looking for that one big law or regulatory fix we can do. I don't think that's going to be where the answer comes from. I think it's going to come from more of a long, slow slog and cultural shift."

Steps could be taken to reasonably limit law enforcement. Going back to prosecutors (who are tremendously important at the local level), states could issue guidelines that try to narrow prosecutors' actions under specific circumstances. Laws could also be changed to give some officials less discretion.

"Legislators could streamline the criminal codes a lot," Pfaff said. "Some states can have 20 to 25 assault provisions, which gives [prosecutors] tremendous authority to stack multiple charges, pick and choose who they're going to get and what for, etc."

There could also be better efforts to collect data on what local police and prosecutors are doing. This could be costly, particularly in rural areas that still work largely with pen and paper, but it would help the media and researchers better gauge what these lower-level systems are doing — something that's frankly impossible in many places today without on-the-ground work.

Fortunately, there are some positive developments in this area. In the past few years, local, state, and federal lawmakers of both political parties have moved to reform the system to ease mass incarceration. The US public, too, has embraced a softer approach to criminal justice — the attention going to Making a Murder captures some of that mood, but polls also show that Americans would like to peel back, for instance, harsh mandatory minimum prison sentences for drugs.

But the system is still largely broken — so much so that when something goes wrong, it's not really surprising no one is held accountable for it. Until that changes, America should expect more cases similar to, although perhaps not as extreme as, Avery's.

What Hillary Knew About Libya

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

13 January 16

 

In Official Washington’s propaganda world, the U.S. government and its “allies” are always standing for what’s right and good and the “enemies” are the epitome of evil doing the vilest things. But some emails to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton depicted a far different reality, writes Robert Parry.

o justify U.S. “regime changes,” the U.S. government has routinely spread rumors and made other dubious claims which – even when later doubted or debunked – are left in place indefinitely as corrosive propaganda, eating away at the image of various “enemies” and deforming public opinion.

Even though this discredited propaganda can have a long half-life – continuing to contaminate the public’s ability to perceive reality for years – President Barack Obama and his administration have shown no inclination to undertake a kind of HAZMAT clean-up of the polluted information environment that American citizens have been forced to live in.

A recent case in point was the emergence – in the State Department’s New Year’s Eve release of more than 3,000 emails to and from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – of evidence that two key propaganda themes used to advance violent “regime change” in Libya in 2011 may have originated with rebel-inspired rumors passed on by Clinton’s private adviser Sidney Blumenthal.

A March 27, 2011 email from Blumenthal reminded Clinton that “I communicated more than a week ago on this story — [Libyan leader Muammar] Qaddafi placing bodies to create PR stunts about supposed civilian casualties as a result of Allied bombing — though underlining it was a rumor. But now, as you know, [Defense Secretary] Robert Gates gives credence to it.”

Blumenthal’s email, which was slugged “Rumor: Q[addafi]’s rape policy,” then plunged ahead into his new rumor: “Sources now say, again rumor (that is, this information comes from the rebel side and is unconfirmed independently by Western intelligence), that Qaddafi has adopted a rape policy and has even distributed Viagra to troops. The incident at the Tripoli press conference involving a woman claiming to be raped is likely to be part of a much larger outrage. Will seek further confirmation.”

A month later, this bizarre Viagra-rape angle became part of a United Nations presentation by then U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice who brought up the Viagra charge in a debate about the evils of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

A U.N. diplomat at the closed session on April 28, 2011, told The Guardian that “It was during a discussion about whether there is moral equivalence between the Gaddafi forces and the rebels. She listed human rights abuses by Gaddafi’s forces, including snipers shooting children in the street and the Viagra story.”

On Blumenthal’s other propaganda point, it’s not clear where Defense Secretary Gates got the idea to accuse Gaddafi of “staging” scenes of U.S.-inflicted carnage, but Blumenthal’s email indicates that he was disseminating that rumor which might have been picked up by Gates, rather than independently confirmed by Gates. (It’s also true that the “staging” excuse has been used before when evidence emerges of U.S. bombs killing civilians.)

Media Self-Interest

Yet, regardless of the truth or falsity of such U.S. claims and counter-claims, the chance that someone inside Official Washington is going to review the lies and exaggerations used to rationalize a major U.S. foreign policy initiative – in this case, the violent overthrow of the Gaddafi regime – to, in effect, “clear” Gaddafi’s name is remote at best.

The few cases of the media debunking U.S. propaganda, such as exposing the made-up claims about Iraqi soldiers killing babies on incubators before the Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, are rare exceptions to the rule. Even rarer are cases when the U.S. government admits that it relied on false information, such as the intelligence community recanting its pre-invasion claims about Iraq hiding WMD stockpiles in 2002-03.

The much more common approach is to simply leave the decaying propaganda in place and move on to the next target of opportunity. There is little benefit for anyone to undertake the painstaking work of separating whatever slices of truth exist within the rot of lies and exaggerations that were used to justify some war.

The way mainstream journalism usually works in America is that a reporter who challenges U.S. government propaganda aimed at a foreign “enemy” is putting his or her career at risk. The reporter’s patriotism will be questioned amid suggestions that he or she is a “fill-in-the-blank-with-the-villain’s-name” apologist.

And since the reality – whatever it is – is usually fuzzy, there is almost never any vindication for a brave stance. So, the smart career play is to go along with the propaganda or stay silent.

A similar reality exists inside the U.S. government. Honest intelligence analysts can expect no rewards if they debunk one of these propaganda themes, especially after a number of important U.S. officials have gone out publicly and sold the falsehood to the people. Making the Secretary of State or the Defense Secretary or the President look bad is not a great career move.

France’s Designs

Plus, the propaganda themes, which stress American righteousness in standing up to foreign evil, are useful in obscuring the self-interested motives that often circle around a killing field like the one that Libya has become.

For instance, another Blumenthal memo to Clinton explained France’s political and pecuniary interests in toppling Gaddafi and thus thwarting his ambitious plans to use Libya’s oil wealth as a means of freeing parts of Africa from French domination.

In an April 2, 2011 email, Blumenthal informed Clinton that sources close to one of Gaddafi sons were reporting that “Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver” and the hoard had been moved from the Libyan Central Bank in Tripoli closer to the border with Niger and Chad.

“This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA).”

Blumenthal then added that “According to knowledgeable individuals, this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion. French intelligence officers discovered this plan shortly after the current rebellion began, and this was one of the factors that influenced President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.”

The email added: “According to these individuals, Sarkozy’s plans are driven by the following issues: a. A desire to gain a greater share of Libya oil production, b. Increase French influence in North Africa, c. Improve his internal political situation in France, d. Provide the French military with an opportunity to reassert its position in the world, e. Address the concern of his advisors over Qaddafi’s long term plans to supplant France as the dominant power in Francophone Africa.”

In an earlier email, dated March 27, 2011, Blumenthal also discussed the French interests in the conflict, citing “knowledgeable individuals” who said that Sarkozy “is pressing to have France emerge from this crisis as the principal foreign ally of any new government that takes power.”

So do you think it would it be easier for the Obama administration to rally American support behind this “regime change” by explaining how the French wanted to steal Libya’s wealth and maintain French neocolonial influence over Africa – or would Americans respond better to propaganda themes about Gaddafi passing out Viagra to his troops so they could rape more women while his snipers targeted innocent children? Bingo!

Seeing No Jihadists

In selling the Libyan policy to the American people, it was also important to downplay another part of the crisis: that Gaddafi was right when he warned of the danger from Islamic radicals, including Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate, operating in eastern Libya.

Gaddafi’s original military offensive was aimed at these groups, but the Obama administration’s propagandists twisted the issue into Gaddafi supposedly committing “genocide” against the people of eastern Libya, thus requiring a U.S.-led “responsibility to protect” or “R2P” mission.

However, in the emails to Clinton, Blumenthal conveyed the actual reality – that these supposedly innocent anti-Gaddafi rebels in the east indeed included jihadist elements. He wrote: “Sarkozy is also concerned about continuing reports that radical/terrorist groups such as the Libyan Fighting Groups and Al Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) are infiltrating the NLC [the rebel’s National Transitional Council] and its military command.

“Accordingly, he [Sarkozy] asked [a] sociologist … who has long established ties to Israel, Syria, and other nations in the Middle East, to use his contacts to determine the level of influence AQIM and other terrorist groups have inside of the NLC. Sarkozy also asked for reports setting out a clear picture of the role of the Muslim Brotherhood in the rebel leadership.”

Blumenthal added: “Senior European security officials caution that AQIM is watching developments in Libya, and elements of that organization have been in touch with tribes in the southeastern part of the country. These [European] officials are concerned that in a post-Qaddafi Libya, France and other western European countries must move quickly to ensure that the new government does not allow AQIM and others to set up small, semi-autonomous local entities — or ‘Caliphates’ — in the oil and gas producing regions of southeastern Libya.”

In other words, the danger of Islamic terror groups exploiting the power vacuum that the Obama administration and its Western allies were creating inside Libya was well understood in March 2011, but the supposed “R2P” mission pressed ahead nevertheless.

The “R2P” advocates also turned a blind eye to evidence that black Africans working for Gaddafi’s government were being systematically rounded up and murdered. As Blumenthal reported to Clinton, “Speaking in strict confidence, one rebel commander stated that his troops continue to summarily execute all foreign mercenaries captured in the fighting.”

These so-called “mercenaries” were contractors from black Africa where many people viewed Gaddafi as a champion of the continent’s development, independent of the former Western imperial powers and the harsh demands of the International Monetary Fund. While some of these blacks were part of Gaddafi’s security structure, others were involved in construction projects.

Whatever their assignments, executing prisoners of war is a war crime – and the image of U.S.-backed rebels singling out black Africans for execution turns the pretense of an “R2P” mission on its head – or perhaps all those noble humanitarian arguments were just phony from the start.

As Brad Hoff of the Levant Report wrote, “historians of the 2011 NATO war in Libya will be sure to notice a few of the truly explosive confirmations contained in the new emails: admissions of rebel war crimes, special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, Al Qaeda embedded in the U.S. backed opposition, Western nations jockeying for access to Libyan oil, the nefarious origins of the absurd Viagra mass rape claim, and concern over Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves threatening European currency.”

Reality’s Hard Sell

But it probably would have been a hard sell to the American people if the U.S. government explained the dark side of the “R2P” mission – that it involved systematic executions of blacks and rapacious Western officials grasping for oil and gold – as well as creating a vacuum for jihadists. Instead, it worked much better to promote wild rumors about Gaddafi’s perfidy.

It is in this way that U.S. citizens, the “We the People” who were supposed to be the nation’s sovereigns, are treated more like cattle herded to the slaughterhouse.

Some of us did try to warn the public about these risks. For instance, on March 25, 2011, days before Blumenthal’s emails, I described the hazard from the neocon “regime change” strategies in Libya and Syria, writing:

“In rallying U.S. support for these rebellions, the neocons risked repeating the mistake they made by pushing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They succeeded in ousting Saddam Hussein, who had long been near the top of Israel’s enemies list, but the war also removed him as a bulwark against both Islamic extremists and Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf. …

“By embracing these uprisings, the neocons invited unintended consequences, including further Islamic radicalization of the region and deepening anti-Americanism. Indeed, a rebel victory over Gaddafi risked putting extremists from an al-Qaeda affiliate in a powerful position inside Libya.

“The major U.S. news media aided the neocon cause by focusing on Gaddafi’s historic ties to terrorism, including the dubious charge that he was behind the Pan Am 103 bombing in 1988. There was little attention paid to his more recent role in combating the surge in al-Qaeda activity, especially in eastern Libya, the base of the revolt against him.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Neocons Regroup on Libyan War.”]

Though the 2011 concerns about Al Qaeda have since morphed into worries about its spinoff, the Islamic State, the larger point remains valid regarding Libya, which descended into the status of failed state after Gaddafi’s ouster and his brutal torture-murder on Oct. 20, 2011. Secretary Clinton greeted the news of Gaddafi’s demise with glee, exulting, “we came, we saw, he died” and then laughed. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Hillary Clinton’s Failed Libya Doctrine.”]

More than four years later, the Obama administration still struggles to piece together some order from the chaos in Libya, where Western governments have even abandoned their Tripoli embassies. Meanwhile, the Islamic State and other jihadist groups continue to expand their control of Libyan territory.

In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has hung on despite continued efforts by the Obama administration and its regional Sunni allies to remove him. The four years of war – waged mostly by jihadists armed and financed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Western powers – have killed a quarter million people and made millions homeless, now spreading the Mideast’s disorders into Europe where the refugee crisis is dividing the European Union.

Of course, in the U.S. mainstream media, the Syrian deaths and destruction are blamed almost entirely on Assad, much as the conflict in Libya was blamed on Gaddafi and the U.S. invasion of Iraq was blamed on Saddam Hussein. In the world created by U.S. propaganda, it is always some other guy’s fault.

In the Syrian case, the major decaying propaganda theme that continues to contaminate public understanding of the crisis has been the accusation that Assad “gassed his own people” with sarin on Aug. 21, 2013. Although independent evidence has long been pointing in the direction of a rebel provocation, perhaps aided by Turkey, the old rotting propaganda is routinely dug up by neocons and their liberal interventionist sidekicks to justify why “Assad must go!” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case.“]

In the case of Libya, Blumenthal’s emails provide a useful window into what was actually happening behind the scenes – and what Secretary of State Clinton knew.

---

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry’s trilogy on the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for only $34. The trilogy includes America’s Stolen Narrative. For details on this offer, click here.