Making a Murderer's Brendan Dassey seeks clemency from Wisconsin governor
Prisoner Brendan Dassey, who is best known featuring in Netflix's 2015 series 'Making a Murderer' has asked the Wisconsin governor to grant him clemency. Speaking to CBS, Dassey's attorney Laura Nirider said, "We’re filing a petition for executive clemency with Governor Tony Evers of Wisconsin," she said adding, "This is his best shot, and the moment is now. The moment is now for Brendan to come home."
Dassey who is 29 now confessed to the murder of photographer Teresa Halbach, 25, when he was 16 years old, along with his uncle Steven Avery. Dassey was convicted of first-degree murder, mutilation of a corpse, and second-degree sexual assault. He is serving a life sentence and his possibility of parole rolls in only in 2048. Even though he was 17 at the time he was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison in 2005.
In his letter to Evers, he said, "I am writing to ask for a pardon because I am innocent and want to go home."
Halbach was reported missing by her parents in November 2005 and she was known to visit the family's salvage yard. Her car with the key in the ignition was found at Dassey's residence and Avery's blood was found in her car. He claimed he was framed.
During the interrogation Dassey confessed to being a co-conspirator in the murder and rape. "When Brendan Dassey was in special education, he was in 10th grade, he required an aide to sit next to him in the classroom to help him understand the teachers' spoken sentences…" Nirider said. "Then shift him into the interrogation room where he was barraged with 1,500 questions over 3.5 hours […] You don't have to be a lawyer to understand how an interrogation like that would overwhelm someone like Brendan Dassey."
Dassey exhausted his appeals in 2018 when the Supreme Court denied his appeal. Dassey said in his first interview on the Wrongful Convictions podcast that he had given into the pressure of the interrogation. "I just wanted it all over with, so I said whatever they wanted to hear, you know?"
Dassey's lawyers also said that in the application that "by his prison conduct and his gentle, patient insistence of his own innocence, Brendan has shown himself to be the rare person who is worthy of clemency," adding that he was also intellectually impaired and was coerced into confessing.
According to the process, anyone still serving a prison sentence is not eligible for clemency. Evers said that they would review it and that he hadn't seen it yet. "We'll deal with it just like we do any communication we receive. We give consideration to all sorts of things that we reject. Whether there´s criteria or not, we'll consider it and respond back to them."