One of the most frustrating things regarding the 10 years Making A Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey spent in jail is that anyone who watched his so-called confession could see it was completely coerced. And considering the judge that overturned Brendan’s conviction called that “the entirety of the case against him,” you’d think everyone would be in agreement that his imminent release was a good thing.
But of course Nancy Grace doesn’t think so.
“I want you to tell me what was wrong with that interrogation, because I say nothing was wrong,” she said on a recent episode of her HLN show. Her guests were attorney David Bruno and Ken Kratz, the prosecutor in the original Steven Avery trial that Newsweek just revealed has a stomach-turning history of sexually assaulting women he came into contact with during court cases.
“Well, I hate to break it to you but this is not a new rule of law,” Bruno started. “Statements have to be voluntary. And now what’s changed here is we now get to see videos of how police conduct themselves in providing Miranda and various other promises and pressures when they have defendants in custody.”
Nancy Grace cut him off claiming he wasn’t answering her question, but here’s an interesting fact about how police interviews are now recorded in Wisconsin. That only started after the Criminal Justice Reform Bill was passed in 2005 … a bill that was known as the Avery bill up until his arrest for murder. As part of the package of changes enacted to avoid wrongful convictions like Avery’s 1985 rape conviction, all interrogations now had to be filmed. So a change in law that Brendan’s uncle is responsible for is what eventually got Brendan’s conviction thrown out.
Nancy Grace also dismissed the judge’s determination that Brendan’s age and IQ played a part, claiming he had an IQ “within the normal range.” The truth of the matter there is that 70 is far below normal and actually where it drops from ‘very low’ to ‘extremely low.’
I’m glad we can catch Grace on a factual point rather than having to wrestle with her ridiculous opinions on the case. Any reasonable person that watched the confession could see the police dragged the story they wanted out of Dassey over four hours, repeating questions and feeding him lines to say back to them.
But I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at Grace’s response. As a prosecutor she was reprimanded by the Supreme Court of Georgia and in a separate federal appeal case for “playing fast and loose with core ethical rules” with behavior that “demonstrated her disregard of the notions of due process and fairness.” That might explain why she doesn’t seem to understand the issue here … she just doesn’t get due process and fairness.
