Judges at odds over Making a Murderer Brendan Dassey's appeal
Judges presiding over Making a Murder’s Brendan Dassey’s appeal to life imprisonment are split on whether police manipulated him into confessing.
As shown in the hit Netflix documentary, Dassey, now 27, was convicted on a confession he made to detectives and sentenced to life in prison in 2007.
He was 16 when he told detectives he helped his uncle, Steven Avery, rape and kill photographer Teresa Halbach in Two Tower, in the US state of Wisconsin.
But the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals in Chicago is deciding whether Dassey’s confession was voluntary, and judges can’t surmise whether the 27-year-old was manipulated into confessing by Manitowoc County investigators.
Court filings say Dassey has a low IQ of about 80 and struggles to understand basic concepts, meanings and consequences, News Corp reports.
The appeal puts into spotlight the actions of the detectives during the interrogation and Chief Judge Diane Wood believes the officers went too far.
She suggested comments made by Dassey during the interrogation show he didn’t understand what was happening. In a video of the interrogation, she noted Dassey asked the detective if he could go back to school after admitting his role in the murder.
Wood also noted Dassey had no legal representation during the interrogation.
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A federal magistrate judge in Milwaukee overturned the 27-year-old’s conviction last year, which was upheld in an appellate court later by a three-judge panel.
The magistrate ruled the detectives took advantage of Dassey’s youth and cognitive disabilities.
The ruling prompted state attorneys to ask the full 7th Circuit for a review.
Wood said the investigators in the video made her “skin crawl”, as they quoted the Bible, telling Dassey the “truth would set him free” and saying they were talking to him more as parental figures than police officers.
“He is obviously racking his brain about how he can answer... in a way (investigators) will like,” Wood said.
Representing the state, Luke Berg argued detectives didn’t psychologically manipulate Dassey and that he confessed, “because his guilt became unbearable”.
Judge Diana Sykes told Dassey’s lawyer, Laura Nirinder, there were no laws barring the detectives from using the techniques they did on her client.
It will take months before a ruling is made and whichever side loses could take the appeal to the US Supreme Court.
Both Avery and Dassey’s cases gained global attention when they were subjects of the crime documentary Making a Murderer in 2015.
