If you have been living in a cave or have been transfixed watching only football over the last two weeks – let’s hope neither is the case – you perhaps have missed the extensive main media and social media attention that has been given to the controversial Netflix documentary, Making a Murderer. The murder of Teresa Hallbach in the fall of 2005 was followed by the arrest and eventual conviction of Steven Avery and his 16-year-old nephew Brandon Dassey.
Controversy will continue as efforts to get a new trial for Steven Avery continue, but less attention has been paid to the so-called “confession” of his nephew, Brandon Dassey. Aside from guilt or innocence, a recent Rolling Stone on-line article about the Netflix piece illustrates what child/youth advocates have been talking about for a long time, namely the high rate of false confessions that can be obtained through interviews with young alleged offenders.
Youth rarely, if ever, truly understand the implications of talking with law enforcement at the time of arrest and/or other questioning, and most have some misplaced sense that the police are there to “help” them in some way. They have every right to invoke constitutional protections against self-incrimination, seek the support of a qualified attorney, and sometimes just say nothing at all about the crime that they may or may not have been involved in.
What would you want for your own child? If you were 16, what protections would you want? For him or her? Watching the Dassey “confession” should cause everyone to pause and think about what you would say and how you would hold up to the skilled and extensive “interview” that Mr. Dassey submitted to – or more importantly, what you would have done if you were in his shoes. I don’t know what happened back in 2011 – what I do know is that youth are easily susceptible to the pressures of law enforcement combined with the short-sighted nature of their adolescent thinking and will confess to things they did not do – along with things they did do?
Today, probably as you are reading this, somewhere in our state there is a youth confessing to something he/she did not do. Thanks to rulings in the past, interviews with youth are required to be taped. Whatever happens in this case, we should think and talk about how to reassure youth that the system is far.
By Jim Moeser
