Brendan Dassey, who was convicted with his uncle, Steven Avery, in the murder of Teresa Halbach, had that conviction overturned Friday by a federal magistrate judge in Milwaukee.
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Netflix got an unbelievable boost from “Making a Murderer” – so much so it’s producing a sequel – so imagine how much it stung when a judge virtually opened the prison door for Brendan Dassey and producers were totally out of position.
Dassey, who is now 26, was 16 when Halbach, a photographer, was killed in 2005 after she went to the Avery family auto salvage yard to take pictures of some vehicles.
The documentary series, and Avery’s defence team, suggested that law enforcement officials in Manitowoc County planted evidence against Avery after he filed a $36 million federal civil rights lawsuit against the county over his 1985 conviction.
Brendan reportedly has an ID of around 70 and “reads at a 4th grade (year 5) level”, and in his ruling Judge William E. Duffin argued: ‘Dassey’s borderline to below average intellectual ability likely made him more susceptible to coercive pressures than a peer of higher intellect’. Court papers describe Dassey as a slow learner with poor grades, with difficulty understanding some aspects of language and expressing himself verbally.
This isn’t the first time Avery’s ex has spoken out against him.
Producers of Making A Murderer are reportedly looking to recreate the moment Brendan Dassey’s conviction was overturned.
On Friday, shocking news came down regarding the case behind the popular Netflix show Making a Murderer.
January 30, 2007: A judge says defense attorneys can tell jurors that Avery was wrongfully convicted of rape and may use as evidence a vial of his blood found unsecured in the Manitowoc County courthouse.
Avery served 18 years in prison before DNA evidence exonerated him of the rape.
April 25, 2007: After 4 1/2 hours of deliberation, the jury convicts Dassey of being party to first-degree intentional homicide, mutilation of a corpse and second-degree sexual assault. Yet, as Judge Duffin explains, the “court’s doubts as to the reliability of Dassey’s confession are not relevant considerations in the assessment of whether Dassey’s confession was constitutionally voluntary”.
Duffin wrote that state courts had “unreasonably found that the investigators never made Dassey any promises” during an interrogation in March 2006.
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The state will now decide in the next 90 days whether to retry Dassey.
