I was thinking only of Steven Avery in my original post, but yeah of Brendan Dassey too. His intellect may be low, but crucially not low enough as far as his school and parents were concerned. So that by the by, at 16 years old he is an adult and old enough to be interviewed on his own. And it's legal for the police to interview a person without a lawyer or anyone else being present, including even (in the uk also, although social work are normally brought in) in the instance of a child where the presence of a parent may not be in the child's best interests, such as in this case where there is a familial connection to the accused.
Having read more about it since watching the show, before the first interview the police apparently offered that his mother could sit in with him during the interview because they were sympathetic towards him and also were aware that there was history of Brendan being sexually abused by Steven, but his mother had refused this offer. I think at the time of the first interview they were only interviewing him as a witness and during the interview he begins to go into detail which made him suspected of involvement.
The full transcript of the interview is available to read online (it was 4 hours long, I've not read it all, only the bullet points) and Brendan goes into loads and loads of detail about the crime and tells the police numerous things that they hadn't known. The defence apparently objected to details of the sexual abuse between Steven and Brendan to be given in court, and also objected to the police interview to be given in court, and hence the sexual abuse wasn't mention and neither was the majority majority of the interview.
The defence also objected to other things being heard in court, such as that Avery always specifically asked for Theresa Halbach whenever he phoned up the car magazine, and that Theresa Halbach had complained to her boss that she felt she was being stalked by Avery, that she was frightened of him, and that he had answered his door naked on one of the occasions she went to his property to take photos. None of these objections were included in the documentary series.
As to Dassey being interviewed without a lawyer after he was officially a suspect, well the police done so on his lawyers say so.
You can't deny the police and the prosecutors made some mistakes, but I felt the documentary was entirely on side with the defence and nowhere near impartial. That whole bit about the prosecution guy trying to have an affair with some woman...what did that have to do with anything? They showed you plenty of their objections that weren't upheld by the judge, but all of their objections that were upheld were not even mentioned. They made it look like the trial was outrageously unfair, but the defence got their way for a lot of it including plenty of crucial evidence that was left out at their request. They tried to create all this scandal to build sensation, cause if they hadn't it would've been a straightforward murder trial and pretty boring.
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