Wrongful Confession Dassey Case Goes to Oral Argument This Morning Before Full Fed Court

Oral argument this morning in 16-3397; Brendan Dassey v. Michael Dittmann

Oral argument before the full, (en banc) United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, will be held this morning on the coerced confession of Brendan Dassey of Wisconsin, featured in Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos' documentary series, Making a Murderer (on Netflix), (16-3397; Brendan Dassey v. Michael Dittmann).

The coercive questioning, dubious confession by the young and cognitively challenged Dassey, arrest and conviction of Dassey shows the Wisconsin criminal justice system as a vicious leviathan run by liars, criminals and jackals, and the Wisconsin Dept of Justice officials who will go to any lengths to protect the conviction of innocents.

The Wisconsin Dept of Justice en banc petition was granted by the federal appellate court on August 4.  

A named litigant in (16-3397; Brendan Dassey v. Michael Dittmann) is Michael A. Dittmann, the warden at the Columbia Correctional Institution in Portage, Wisconsin.

Dassey's outrageous conviction was overturned in federal court by U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin on Aug. 12, 2016. But Dassey remains in prison while the Republican-dominated Wisconsin DoJ continues its work to protect Dassey's conviction for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach, (Thompson, USA Today, Wisconsin).

A definitive ruling would expose the Wisconsin criminal justice system to widespread ridicule. The case is expected to be appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

Misconduct in Manitowoc: Police Induced False Confession, Say Expert and Attorney

Manitowoc County in east-central Wisconsin
(blackened in image) is located deep in Republican
territory, a region notorious for corrupt police
and law enforcement. 'Where did all that cocaine
from the evidence room go?' National reporters should ask
sources surrounding Manitowoc County about an
array of open secrets not flattering to police. Local
Wisconsin journalists certainly will not.

Updated - In Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos' documentary series, Making a Murderer (on Netflix), the cast of uncharged criminals wear a badge or have sworn an oath. They all work for law enforcement.

The prosecution's most damning witness, Brendan Dassey, had an IQ below 70 and was 16-years-old.

Police investigators played Dassey's condition to the hilt, working with a corrupt Manitowoc County Sheriff Dept. and District Attorney's office to wrongfully convict two innocents, Dassey and Steven Avery, featured in the film series.

After [Brendan Dassey] confessed to helping his uncle rape and kill the photographer, [Brendan] Dassey asked police if he could go back to school to make his 1:30 class; amid a similar admission, [another innocent cognitively challenged Clarence] Burcham asked if he could go on a family camping trip.

'To me, that's pretty clear evidence that they don't really understand what's going on here,' [Lawrence White, a psychology professor at Beloit College in Wisconsin,] said. The men maybe thought, "I'm not going to go to prison for this, because I'm innocent. It'll all get straightened out." And they're very naive to think that.' (Lyden, InForum)

That law enforcement investigators induce false confessions (and lie about confessions) comes as no surprise to retired public defender, Reesa Evans.

Ms. Evans is a retired attorney who in 1999 referred Avery to the Midwest Innocence Project (MIP) just after the University of Wisconsin-Madison established an Innocence Project chapter in 1998.

Ms. Evans had been appointed by the Court to represent Avery in 1985. MIP Legal Director Tricia Bushnell is now assisting as local Wisconsin counsel for Steven Avery.

In December 1985, Steven Avery was convicted of a vicious rape, prosecuted by many of the same unsavory bunch of Manitowoc County officials who evidence shows later framed Avery for the murder of Teresa Halbach, as asserted in the 2005-06 trial, after Avery was exonerated and after he served 18 years in prison.

Freed in 2003, Avery filed a $36 million federal civil suit against Manitowoc County, naming several law enforcement officials as defendants.

The law enforcement officials exacted their revenge on Avery.

In an exclusive interview, Avery's 1985 attorney, Reesa Evans, says "bad faith" and systemic breakdowns in law enforcement in the criminal justice system lead her to the conclusion that part of the oath of office prosecutors take is often ignored, the commitment to see justice done.

Evans said also she is sympathetic to Brendan Dassey's false confession.

"It's difficult to understand false confessions. They happen more than people realize. Unless you have been through it, you do not realize the pressures involved," said Evans. "Interrogations involve an isolated situation with multiple cops, you can understand people would start feeling guilty when they are innocent. Investigators lie, they often will say, 'tell us this, and you can go home,' right before making an arrest."

Evans was invited last year to the premier of Making a Murderer in New York. She made the trip, viewed the first two episodes and said the series is "amazing."

Still, Evans found the series upsetting. "It was very difficult and most of all emotionally upsetting. All the feelings of powerlessness and frustration, [Dassey and Avery] went through," Evans said.

Evans is living in central Wisconsin. She did an interview with Newsweek, but said she is declining future interview requests about the documentary series.

"Laura and Moira interviewed me for about 15 hours. It's an amazing accomplishment. The series is looking at the flawed criminal justice system, as much as this particular case," said Evans.

In the 1985 case in which Avery was proven innocent, Evans notes likely prosecutorial misconduct, specifically possible Brady violations, the duty of the prosecution to disclose materially exculpatory evidence in the government's possession to the defense.

"There were possible exculpatory house-to-house results of police interviews that were not disclosed before [the 1985 trial and conviction of Avery for which he exonerated after serving 18 years]," said Evans.

In the second 2005-06 case against Avery in which Evans was not involved, Evans said she had not ever heard of a "preventative detention" and other misconduct to which Avery was subjected after he filed his civil suit.

Notes John Ferak in the Appleton Post Crescent:

Manitowoc County Sheriff's Lt. James Lenk and Sgt. Andrew Colborn were suspected of becoming aware of evidence during the 1990s that Avery did not commit the 1985 rape and ignoring the information, while Avery remained in prison. In October 2005, less than three weeks before Teresa Halbach is murdered, Lenk and Colborn were questioned during a sworn deposition connection with Avery's $36 million lawsuit against Manitowoc County. After Halbach disappeared, Lenk and Colborn thrust themselves into the investigation, focusing on Avery. Colborn interviewed Avery the same night Halbach is reported missing. Lenk interviewed Avery the next morning. Lenk approached Halbach's vehicle after it was found. Lenk found the keys to Halbach's vehicle inside Avery's bedroom in plain view after officers from Calumet County, the state Division of Criminal Investigation.

One hopes for criminal justice reforms revolutionary in nature in the face of the putative and defective system Robert Jackson warned us about in 1940.

In the meantime, trust in law enforcement is misplaced. You want to walk, don't talk because police lie.

Film on Police Frame-up in Manty, Wisconsin Drawing National Attention

Update: Making A Murderer: Anonymous claims to have evidence that Netflix documentary’s subject, Steven Avery, is innocent, (Griffin, The Independent).

It would appear a significant chunk of the American people have had enough of the routine police and prosecutorial misconduct.

From Chicago to the coasts to Ferguson and up to Manitowoc, Wisconsin, the forces preying on the public wear a badge or represent the state. They are a grave threat to the citizenry, (Schilling, The Guardian).

Nowhere is this anti-American dynamic captured more poignantly than in the new film series, Making a Murderer (on Netflix) by Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos.

"When the prosecutor is at his best is one of the most beneficent forces in our society, when he acts from malice or other base motives, he is one of the worst," warned the great jurist and public intellectual, Robert Jackson, (U.S. DoJ). Jackson's worst fears, made famous in his 1940 address as U.S. attorney general, are a fact of life today.

CBS News has a segment this morning.

WISC-TV (Madison, Wisconsin) is airing another piece today and tonight in which Madison attorney Dean Strang is interviewed.

Strang is featured throughout the Making a Murderer series fighting corruption and betrayals by the Manitowoc Sheriff's office and multi-jurisdictional prosecutors and unscrupulous criminal investigators.

Strang has had plenty of experience defending the public against prosecutors gone wild.

From his footage in Making a Murderer it's clear Strang has had enough.

Film Series Show Wisconsin Criminal Justice as Systemic Scandal

Wisconsin fiends make national news
again. This time the fiends wear a badge.

Routine Police-Prosecutor Misconduct Highlights Need for Independent Conviction Integrity Unit

In Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos' documentary series, Making a Murderer (on Netflix), the Wisconsin criminal justice system is exposed as a leviathan run by liars, criminals and jackals (and the judges who protect them), a lawless system of unethical men and women in two infamous cases.

Everyone went along for the ride in the Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey wrongful convictions, from liberal officials in the Wisconsin Department of Justice to the Green Bay press to the progressive daily, The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin) (March 14, 2007 editorial).

The unindicted criminals and most repulsive actors are Wisconsin local law enforcement—abetted by the state attorney general's office, the FBI and Wisconsin judges—in the case of the innocent-but-convicted Avery and young Mr. Dassey, human beings who were "ground up and spit out by this 'system,'" as described by attorney Dean Strang, one of the few rays of light in this spectacle.

Making a Murderer chronicles the 1985 wrongful conviction of Steven Avery who "spent 18 years in prison for a sexual assault that DNA evidence later proved he did not commit. Avery was released from prison in 2003 after his conviction was overturned, but two years later he was charged in the horrifying murder of a young photographer named Teresa Halbach. At the time, Avery had filed a $36 million civil lawsuit against Manitowoc County for his wrongful conviction," (Butler, Washington Post).

Avery and Dassey are the victims of the retaliatory framing scheme, revenge perpetrated by the Manitowoc County, (Wisconsin) Sheriff's office and the multi-jurisdictional malicious prosecutions begun because Avery was about to expose the ugly realities of law enforcement in his $36 million civil lawsuit. Both are serving life sentences.

What is illustrated so vividly by Ricciardi and Demois is the extent to which prosecutors and the police enjoy a license to lie, slander and destroy the lives of innocents, without any integrity checks on their misconduct.

Making a Murderer maps the dystopian landscape in which the state, the 'Sovereign,' arrests, prosecutes and secures the convictions of as many 'offenders' as possible and locks them away in a huge complex of 'correctional' institutions either subsidized by the citizenry or publicly traded in the securities markets, a disgrace that Scott Walker and Tommy Thompson inflicted with their work on behalf of for-profit prison companies such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CXW), (New York Times), (ALEC Exposed, PRWatch) (Mal Contends).

The Avery-Dassey documentary is a masterpiece of journalism begun after Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demo read a piece in the New York Times.

It's critical to note some of the perpetrators.

Special prosecutor Kenneth Kratz, a deceitful piece of human garbage who is now the apparent recipient of death threats after the airing of Making a Murderer since Dec. 18, 2015 (Purl, WGN). Krats is in private practice now in Superior, Wisconsin.

Source: State Bar of Wisconsin

There's Brendan Dassey's attorney, the despicable Len Kachinsky, who with his investigator plotted against and ridiculed his own client, an offense that draws no objection from the toothless Wisconsin Office of Lawyer Regulation.

Kachinsky is hiding out today in Outagamie County in Appleton and his name has been scrubbed from the law offices of Robert J. Sisson website.

Law Offices of Sisson and Kachinsky

The State Bar of Wisconsin indicates Sisson's firm as "Sisson Kachinsky Law Offices."

Kachinsky threw Dassey, a cognitively challenged 16-year-old, to two investigators, Mark Wiegert, (sergeant at the Calumet County Sheriff's Office), and Tom Fassbender (Wisconsin Division of Criminal Investigation investigator), who weren't looking for the truth but trying (successfully) to get Dassey to mutter words portrayed as admissions of guilt and supporting a lurid, contrived tale of guilt of Avery in the revenge prosecution (Ferek, Appleton Post-Crescent).

Wiegert and Fassbender were on Dassey like jackals in interrogations, a display of the whole disgrace that the Wisconsin criminal justice system has become.

On a final note, former Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen (R) (2007-2015) announced on May 2, 2008, these human garbage, Wiegert and Fassbender, received the Meritorious Service Award from the Wisconsin Association of Homicide Investigators, (Wisconsin Dept. of Justice).

Not that Van Hollen's predecessor performed any better in the Avery affair.

"Peggy Lautenschlager, Wisconsin's Attorney General in 2003, directed the Wisconsin Department of Justice to investigate the merits of the 1985 wrongful conviction of Steven Avery. The DOJ released an 18-page report on Dec. 17, 2003, finding 'there is no basis to bring criminal charges or assert ethics violations against anyone involved in the investigation and prosecution of this case,'" (Ferak, Appleton Post-Crescent). Lautenschlager did what was politically expedient.

Except for the families of the wrongfully convicted and the defense attorneys, Dean Strang and Jerome Buting and the Innocence Project, few emerged from this affair appearing anything but indecent and corrupt.

In the Avery-Dassey scandal, Wisconsin law enforcement, the Wisconsin press, and the Wisconsin judicial system resemble nothing so much as benighted fools and corrupt betrayers of the public from Alabama.

Wonder if anything reformist in nature will become of this indecency as a result of the film. Revolutionary change is needed.