A federal judge in Milwaukee overturned the conviction of Brendan Dassey, the then-16-year-old whose case was featured on the highly popular Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”
Dassey was originally convicted of first-degree intentional homicide, second-degree sexual assault and mutilation of a corpse. At the age of 17 years and 6 months, he was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 2048. One of the key pieces of his conviction was a confession that was the focus of a couple of episodes in the Making a Murderer series, but judge William E. Duffin ruled that investigators repeatedly made false promises to Dassey in extracting the confession. The judge ruled that the confession was involuntary in the 91-page decision he handed down on Friday.
“These repeated false promises, when considered in conjunction with all relevant factors, most especially Dassey’s age, intellectual deficits, and the absence of a supportive adult, rendered Dassey’s confession involuntary under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Wisconsin Court of Appeals’ decision to the contrary was an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law,” Duffin wrote.
Could Go Free Soon
Judge Duffin ordered Dassey to be set free unless the state initiates a retrial within the next 90 days. They could also appeal the decision, but Dassey’s legal team said they would petition for him to be released on bond while the appeal was pending.
“A lot’s going to depend on what the state does here,” said Dassey’s attorney Steve Drizin, who works for the Northwestern University’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth. “I am just so excited.”
Drizin’s team investigated the Dassey case for two years before filing an appeal in 2010, but that was ultimately denied by a state appellate court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Down but not out, Drizin and his team took the case to federal court in Wisconsin in 2014 in hopes of being granted a writ of Habeas corpus, which would have forced the government to examine and rule whether Dassey had been imprisoned illegally. The focus of the petition focused largely on the incompetence of Dassey’s original public defender, Len Kachinsky, whose ineptitude (which is featured in the documentary) eventually led to his removal from the case.
“A lot of our appeal has to do with the actions that Brendan’s original attorney Len Kachinsky took, which demonstrated his disloyalty to Brendan and his willingness to work with the prosecution to try to get Brendan to plead guilty and testify against Steven Avery,” Drizin said. “To me, this case is a classic example of how not to interrogate juvenile suspects and the tactics that were used during Brendan’s interrogation are a recipe for false confessions.”
Drizin said that although the documentary put Dassey’s case in the national spotlight, he thinks the reversal would have happened even if Making a Murderer was never released.
“I don’t think that the Netflix movie is going to influence a federal judge, but at the same time, judges are human beings and the Netflix film has created a context for Brendan’s case that didn’t exist at the time of his trial or his appeals,” he concluded.
