Brendan Dassey

All right, y'all, before we adjourn for the day, a quick update on a case that pretty much everyone who watches true crime knows, making a murderer.

Nearly 21 years after Teresa Halbach was murdered, Stephen Avery and Brendan Dassey are both asking Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers to commute their sentences.

And this is important.

They're not being exonerated, and this isn't another appeal of their convictions.

That's true.

Okay, so they Brendan Dassey Link Haver

here.

Yeah, they do.

They sure do.

And for those who don't know what I'm talking about, Brendan Dassey is the poor, dim-witted teenager who they also pin crimes on that it sure seems at the very least that Brendan Dassey had nothing to do with them but in making a murderer.

Yeah, Making a

Murderer, that seminal Netflix true crime documentary.

And this is exactly what happened in Making a Murderer.

Like, everybody got wrapped up in the Brendan Dassey of it all.

Yep.

Which is an injustice in my opinion.

my mind exactly where I was going to go.

And so this Brendan Dassey... his interrogation became famous there was a whole four hour one hour episode on on his him and his interrogation okay i worked on that case i wasn't on the show but i worked on it in state post conviction and so i had five back then you know we had um dvd cds right now uh they send you a via, you know, an MP3 or MP4 VLC file, but back then they sent you the disc.

Okay.

So, so I go on my spring break, my, my, my winter break, and this is the rage, you know, by the time three weeks later, when school starts in January of 2016, it 70 million Americans have watched it.

Right.

And, uh, I'm teaching a seminar on wrongful convictions of the innocent, one week of which is on interrogation and confessions.

So I say to my students, I've got five Brendan Dassey cassettes or whatever it is, five hours, you know, however it's distributed.

I said, these are all of them.

Huge.

But the part of that series that left viewers with a lingering, sickening feeling in their stomachs was the interrogation of his teenage nephew, Brendan Dassey.

Without rehashing that entire documentary, it was that specific feeling of watching a vulnerable person be subtly and not so subtly steered by authority figures until the truth was just completely buried under coercion.

Yes.