Making a Murder’s Brendan Dassey’s Case is Tossed

Last Friday, I posted a blog about high profile defendants challenging the effectiveness of their counsel’s representation at trial. Sometimes it’s a winning argument; most often it’s not. At the end of the day on Friday, another high profile case that was on appeal (actually it was a federal habeas petition after the state appeals were finished) made news. Brendan Dassey–the co-defendant in the 2005 murder of Theresa Halbach–made famous by the Netflix series Making a Murderer was granted his petition for relief. A federal judge in Wisconsin ordered Dassey’s release from prison within 90 days unless the state initiates proceedings to retry him between now and then. This was a big story even though the news cycle was overloaded with news from the presidential campaigns, Olympics, riots in Milwaukee, floods in Louisiana, and more. I reviewed the 91-page decision…