Avery’s attorney, Kathleen Zellner, told the station that Avery is happy for his nephew.
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The White House explained that because the men were not convicted of federal crimes and “are both state prisoners”, pardoning them was outside the scope of the President’s power.
A federal judge in Wisconsin on Friday overturned the conviction of a man found guilty of helping his uncle kill a woman in a case profiled in the Netflix documentary series “Making a Murderer“, ruling that investigators used deceptive tactics in obtaining a confession.
In 2005 Dassey and his uncle Steven Avery were sentenced to life in prison for the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach on their rural scrap auto property. Avery remains in prison as he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
On Friday, a federal judge ruled investigators made false promises and took advantage of Dassey’s age and intellectual deficiencies to unfairly coerce a confession. Now, the state can decide to retry him, appeal, or it will have to release him within 90 days.
2013: Dassey’s request for a new trial and for a review of the original ruling are denied by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals and the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Fox had previously declined Dassey’s request for a new court-provided attorney, but after discovering that Kachinsky had allowed Dassey to be questioned by Wiegert and Fassbender alone, Fox removed Kachinsky from the case. The 10-part show followed Avery’s first conviction, which landed him in prison for 18 years until he was exonerated.
Dassey was convicted of homicide and sexual assault in 2007, following the murder of photographer Teresa Halback in 2005. Both Avery and Dassey are serving separate life sentences. His attorneys argued that his constitutional rights were violated throughout the investigation.
The case was thrown into the national spotlight late past year by the popular 10-part Netflix documentary series.
Photographer Teresa Halbach, born March 22, 1980, in Kaukauna, Wisconsin, [11] was reported missing by her parents on November 3, 2005.
Now that the 26-year-old is going to be released from prison, many are expecting the same situation will happen to his uncle Steven Avery. Once considered in this proper light, the conclusion that Dassey’s statement was involuntary under the totality of the circumstances is not one about which “fair minded jurists could disagree”. Duffin also noted that Dassey was a learning-disabled high school student at the time of his confession, and that investigators made promises of leniency to Dassey that were not kept.
After a great deal of leading and pressing, the detectives finally wrought a “confession” out of Dassey, at times all but putting words in his mouth.
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Thus, Judge Duffin then turned to analyze other circumstances surrounding Dassey’s confession, with a particular focus on the conduct of investigators and Dassey’s intellectual deficits.
