Lawyers for Brendan Dassey, a borderline intellectually disabled man who was featured in the Netflix series “Making a Murderer,” have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to hear his case and review a ruling from a federal appeals court that found he voluntary confessed to assisting in the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach.
Dassey’s legal team filed his petition before the court Tuesday and argued in its petition the case raises significant issues that have for decades divided state and federal courts.
“Too many courts around the country, for many years, have been misapplying or even ignoring the Supreme Court’s instructions that confessions from mentally impaired kids like Brendan Dassey must be examined with the greatest care — and that interrogation tactics which may not be coercive when applied to an adult can overwhelm children and the mentally impaired,” Steven Drizin, one of Dassey’s lawyers, said in a statement.
Dassey was convicted by a Wisconsin court in 2007 and sentenced to life in prison for helping his uncle, Steven Avery, rape and kill Halbach, a photographer, in 2005. Halbach’s charred remains were found on Avery’s property in Manitowoc County, Wis.
Then 16 years old, Dassey confessed during police interrogation to assisting Avery, though his lawyers argue the controversial confession was improperly coerced.
A federal court in Wisconsin overturned Dassey’s conviction in 2016 and held the confession was unconstitutionally coerced. The decision was affirmed by a three-judge panel from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but the full appeals court voted 4-3 to reverse the lower court’s decision to grant Dassey a new trial.
The three dissenting judges called the ruling from the full appeals court a “profound miscarriage of justice.”
In their petition to the Supreme Court, Dassey’s lawyers argued the confession was involuntary and noted Dassey, who is now in his late 20s, has “significant intellectual and social limitations.”
According to the petition filed with the Supreme Court, Dassey was interrogated four times over two days. During the interrogation, Dassey’s lawyers said he “repeatedly gave wrong answers to questions about the crimes, thereby suggesting he was not involved.”
His interrogators, though, “fed him the ‘right’ answers” and told him he would be allowed to go free if he confirmed what they said, according to the petition.
“Put simply, the interrogators took advantage of Dassey’s young and mental limitations to convince him they were on his side, ignored his manifest inability to correctly answer many of their questions about the crimes, fed him facts so he could say what they wanted to hear, and promised that he would be set free if he did so,” Dassey’s legal team wrote.
The case was the subject of “Making a Murderer,” which premiered on Netflix in 2015.
