Brendan Dassey was 16 years old when he confessed to assisting his uncle, Steven Avery, with the rape and murder of Teresa Halbach. His case and subsequent appeals were made famous in the 2015 Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”
Center on Wrongful Convictions
According to data from the National Registry of Exonerations, Illinois has a false confession rate more than three times higher than the national average. Is there “a culture in Chicago of solving cases by confession?”
More than 2,000 exoneration cases are on record in the U.S., according to the National Registry of Exonerations. Only a handful of people appear on that list twice, and one of them is Chicago native Dana Holland.