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Brendan Dassey, the nephew of the man at the center of Netflix's Making a Murderer series, must be released from prison if the state of Wisconsin does not choose to grant him a new trial, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.
Dassey, the nephew of Steven Avery, was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Teresa Halbach, but questions surrounded Dassey's confession to the crime — highlighted in videos of the confession that were included in the Netflix show.
"If a state court can evade all federal review by merely parroting the correct Supreme Court law," Judge Ilana Rovner wrote of the state's ruling that Dassey's confession in the case of Halbach's murder was not coerced, "then the writ of habeas corpus is meaningless."
The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit panel hearing the state's appeal of Dassey's case reached the decision that the confession was coerced on a 2-1 vote, with Judge David Hamilton dissenting. A federal district court previously ordered that Dassey be released or retried, but the state had appealed the decision.
The appeals court held that the state court did not properly examine the "totality of the circumstances" when considering whether Dassey's confession was impermissibly coerced.
Rovner summarized at one point in the lengthy decision Dassey's "characteristics and deficits" that should have, the appeals court held, gone into that decision.
"Sixteen‐year‐old Dassey walked into the interrogation room without a parent, a lawyer, or an advocate to look out for his rights. He had never had any contacts with law enforcement prior to his interviews in this case. As described in the fact section, he was passive, docile and withdrawn. He also suffered from intellectual deficits. His IQ was in the low average or borderline range. ... [H]e had difficulty understanding some aspects of language and ex‐ pressing himself verbally. ... Testing also revealed ... he was likely to be more suggestible than 95% of the population."
After 102 pages of considering the facts of the case, Supreme Court law regarding coerced confessions and federal review of state court decisions, and the application of that law to Dassey's case, Rovner concluded, "Had the state court given Dassey’s confession any of this required care, it simply could not have overcome the many doubts that his confession raises about voluntariness."
Because that confession was "essentially the only evidence the State presented against Dassey at trial," the appeals court also concluded that wrongly admitting the confession at trial could not have been "harmless error" that would allow the conviction to stand.
Wisconsin officials will now have to decide whether to seek further review of Thursday's decision from the full Seventh Circuit or the Supreme Court, to retry Dassey's case, or to release him.
You can read the full ruling here:
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/2sWhG5I
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