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'Making A Murderer' Subject Brendan Dassey Should Be Freed, Appeals Panel Rules

By Stephen Gossett in News on Jun 22, 2017 9:26PM

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Brendan Dassey in 'Making a Murderer'

He should be released. That was the determination reached on Wednesday by a three-judge appeals panel in the case of Brendan Dassey, one of the subjects of Netflix's Making a Murderer. The judges, in a 2-1 vote, agreed with an August ruling that Dassey's confession had been coerced and his conviction should be overturned.

Among other charges, Dassey in 2007 was convicted of being party to first-degree murder in the killing of Teresa Halbach, a photographer who disappeared after she was known to have visited the salvage yard of Steven Avery, Dassey's uncle, in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin. Dassey was sentenced to life with a possibility of parole in 2048. Avery, meanwhile, was sentenced to life in prison.

Dassey's conviction and sentence were then overturned last year after a judge ruled his confession had been coerced; but just as he was about to be set free last November, a federal appeals court ruled against his release. Now that the panel from the Seventh Circuit in Chicago has upheld the ruling that overturned his conviction, prosecutors must either appeal the case to the Supreme Court, retry Dassey within 90 days, or set him free.

The investigation and trial of Dassey and Avery were chronicled in the popular 2015 Netflix docu-series Making a Murderer, part of wave of multi-part true-crime documentaries that emerged around the time. It sparked much conversation about wrongful convictions and coerced confessions.

As we noted at the time of Dassey's release denial, despite criticism that filmmakers had stacked the deck in the series with selective editing to make the investigation and trials appear more egregious than they may have been, video of Dassey's interrogation made it seem entirely clear that the cognitively disabled, then-16-year-old boy did not truly grasp the situation.

Avery—who, as the documentary lays out, was once wrongly convicted—is also appealing.