However you feel about Steven Avery, the man at the center of Netflix’s documentary series Making A Murderer, it seems abundantly clear that his nephew, Brendan Dassey, was completely screwed over. As seen in the documentary, Dassey was convicted in 2007 of helping his uncle murder Teresa Halbach, but his confession was very clearly coerced. In November of last year, a Milwaukee judge finally recognized that and decided to overturn Dassey’s conviction, granting him supervised release from prison while the state decided it it wanted to pursue a retrial. Instead, the state appealed the judge’s decision, keeping Dassey in prison and leaving a federal appeals court to decide if his conviction should be overturned or not.
Today, ABC News is reporting that the appeals court has indeed chosen to uphold the overturned conviction, meaning Dassey might actually get out of prison now. The state of Wisconsin has 90 days to decide if it wants to attempt a retrial, but unless the video of the cops illegally pushing Dassey to confess has magically changed in the last decade, putting Dassey through another trial seems like it would be a waste of everyone’s time. Still, the state may disagree for some stupid reason, so now Dassey just has to wait and see what happens.
In a statement, Dassey’s legal team said, “We are overjoyed for Brendan and his family, and we look forward to working to secure his release from prison as soon as possible. As of today’s date, Brendan Dassey has lost 4,132 days of his life to prison.”