Moments ago it was announced that Brendan Dassey’s life sentence for the murder of Teresa Halbach was being vacated following a lengthy appeal process. Dassey has spent over 10 years behind bars largely due to a confession the 2015 true crime documentary Making a Murderer revealed to be massively flawed. The state of Wisconsin now has 90 days to either appeal the ruling or retry him.
Dassey was represented by a team of lawyers from the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth led by Laura Nirider and Steve Drizin. They took a multi-pronged approach to overturning his conviction, which was good because several of their best and most logical arguments were shot down by the Wisconsin court due to technicalities or precedent from past cases.
For example, they put forward the outrageous behavior of Brendan’s original attorney, Len Kachinsky. But today’s filing shows how backwards the legal system can be when presented with misconduct.
“Although Kachinsky’s misconduct was indefensible, the United States Supreme Court has never accepted arguments such as those Dassey makes here as a basis for relief under Sullivan,” the judge’s conclusion stated. “Therefore, federal law prohibits the court from granting Dassey habeas relief on the first claim he presented to this court.”
Fortunately, the court found issue in the interview where Brendan confessed. Not because the detectives bullied and goaded him into agreeing with their version of the truth over the course of several hours, but because they made ‘promises’ to the boy.
“However, the state courts unreasonably found that the investigators never made Dassey any promises during the March 1, 2006 interrogation. The investigators repeatedly claimed to already know what happened on October 31 and assured Dassey that he had nothing to worry about. 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.”
As we mentioned before, this isn’t the end of the nightmare for Brendan Dassey. The state has 90 days to file an appeal against the judge’s motion, or they could decide to retry him. But with the confession effectively thrown out, there’s very little left to try Dassey with. Since Steven Avery’s appeal is being filed at the end of August, prosecutors may feel it’s a better idea to simply let the flawed case against Brendan Dassey go away rather than have it play out again at the same time as Avery’s appeal is being considered.
As for Avery’s appeal, this situation with Dassey shows you how strange and byzantine the court appeal process is. Seeming misconduct by Brendan’s lawyer was ignored, along with a bunch of other questionable actions. But one aspect of the police’s behavior while interrogating Dassey ended up clearing his conviction. That’s enough to give you a glimmer of hope for Steven Avery (if you believe he’s innocent) but also a lot of dread regarding the fairness of the appeals process.
As Avery’s former lawyers have said during the Making a Murderer documentary, appeals are designed with an extremely high threshold for success. You could almost argue that it’s an arbitrary system where the judge can use case history to accept or swat down any appeal they get. Without the world watching closely following the success of the Netflix series, would Brendan’s appeal have been successful?
Steven Avery has some advantages. He has legions of people who have watched Making a Murderer who are convinced he’s innocent, and these people are a force than can take any relevant information and evidence and make it go viral over the net. He has Kathleen Zellner, one of the best wrongful conviction lawyers in the U.S. And she claims she has a ‘tsunami’ of new evidence. She’s so confident in her case that she’s aiming to get his conviction vacated in a similar manner to Dassey.
But Avery wasn’t convicted largely off the weight of a false confession. There’s a lot of evidence against the 54-year-old in the murder of Teresa Halbach. A bullet with her DNA was found in his garage. Her car was found in his salvage yard. Her camera and cell phone were recovered smashed and burnt from burn barrels on his property. And forensics experts claim Halbach’s body was cremated by a bonfire in his backyard.
This isn’t a case where a single impropriety on the part of prosecutors or police will clear him of the murder. Zellner is going to have to work from A to Z to destroy every piece of evidence the state has against Avery. And as you saw in the case of Dassey, she can’t just prove it using logic and common sense. It all has to be proven through accepted Wisconsin appeal case law.
Crass as it sounds to say with a man’s life hanging in the balance and the death of a woman at the heart of this case, but this is all making for one hell of a second season for Making a Murderer.