Lawyers are to fight for the release of Brendan Dassey, a suspect and prisoner featured in the Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer, after judges backed a ruling that his confession was coerced.
Steven Avery’s attorney went to Waupun Correctional Institution on Friday to inform her client that a federal court a day earlier had affirmed a lower court’s ruling overturning his nephew’s conviction in the 2005 death of photographer Teresa Halbach.
The federal panel ruled that Dassey’s confession, in which he said he helped his uncle in raping and killing Halbach, was involuntary under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. Schimel’s Justice Department appealed the ruling to the 7th Circuit.
Previously, the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals said that “no reasonable court” could find his confession was voluntary.
The case caught the public’s imagination in Netflix’s documentary series Making a Murderer.
When considered with “Dassey’s age, intellectual deficits, and the absence of a supportive adult”, he considered the confession coerced.
“And this pattern continued until Dassey finally voiced what the investigators wanted him to say, seemingly guessing, or the investigators fed him the information they wanted”.
Avery trial attorney Jerry Buting tweeted, “Hurrah!”
His conviction was overturned in 2016 on the basis his confession, made as a 16-year-old, was coerced.
“We anticipate seeking review by the entire Seventh Circuit or the United States Supreme Court and hope that today’s erroneous decision will be reversed”, he told new agency Reuters in an email. They have 90 days to decide whether they’ll retry him.
“While these tactics might not have overwhelmed a seasoned criminal or a 30-year-old with a law degree, they clearly overwhelmed a 16-year-old, socially avoidant, intellectually limited [youth] who had never been interrogated by the police before”, he said.
“We continue to send our condolences to the Halbach family as they have to suffer through another attempt by Mr. Dassey to re-litigate his guilty verdict and sentence”, Koremenos said in a statement.
But Dassey’s confession, according to the ruling, was “a story crafted by the investigators” and not by him.
“THIS JUST IN”, Dassey’s attorney Steven Drizin tweeted on Thursday.
The court described the method used to get Dassey to confess as “death by a thousand cuts”, with judge David Hamilton saying the decision “breaks new ground and poses troubling questions for police and prosecutors”.
During one of the interviews, for example, Wisconsin Department of Justice Special Agent Tom Fassbender said: “Mark and I, yeah, we’re cops, we’re investigators and stuff like that, but I’m not right now”.
WBAY reached out to Steven Avery’s family and they declined to provide comment.