Last November, a judge in Milwaukee who must’ve finally gotten around to watching Making A Murderer decided to overturn the conviction of Brendan Dassey, who has been in prison since 2007 after he confessed to helping his uncle Steven Avery in the rape and murder of a woman named Teresa Halbach. As people who have seen the aforementioned Netflix documentary series probably know, though, Dassey’s confession was pretty clearly coerced, making the recent moves to get his conviction overturned a very belated bit of justice for a guy who was 16 when the cops pushed him to confess to the crime.
The state of Wisconsin appealed the judge’s decision, and although an appeals court decided to uphold the overturning, the state continued fighting it and Dassey has remained in prison. Now, ABC News is reporting that a full federal appeals court will now hear Dassey’s case, with the state arguing that overturning the conviction has “upended long-accepted police interrogation techniques” and Dassey’s side presumably suggesting that maybe that’s the whole point.
The court will consider both sides today, but ABC News says that a ruling “may not come for weeks or months.”