MILWAUKEE (AP) — Lawyers for Brendan Dassey, one of two men featured in the Netflix series “Making a Murderer,” say they’ll take immediate steps to secure his release now that a federal appeals court says his confession was improperly obtained. Laura Nirider of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth at Northwestern University says they’re still considering those steps but want to send Dassey home to his mother as soon as possible. She says he’s already been in prison for 4,132 days. Dassey was sentenced to life in prison in 2007 in photographer Teresa Halbach’s death two years earlier. Dassey told detectives he helped his uncle, Steven Avery, rape and kill Halbach in the Avery family’s Manitowoc County salvage yard. Center director Steven Drizin says the ruling provides a model for the kind of analysis that courts should undertake in assessing whether a confession was voluntary. He says that while the interrogators’ tactics might not have overwhelmed a seasoned criminal or a lawyer, they clearly broke an intellectually limited 16-year-old.
