Dassey Retrial Hearing Day One
The hearing for a request for retrial of Brendan Dassey started on 15 January, 2010. The defense opened with two witnesses. Dassey was convicted in 2007 for the 2005 rape and murder of Teresa Halbach. Dassey’s uncle, Steven Avery, was convicted for the murder of Halbach.
Ineffective counsel is a major part of the request. Much of the 184 page Memorandum of Facts and Law Accompanying Section 809.30 Post‑Conviction Motion (Memorandum) filed by the defense details the inadequacies of the defense attorneys.
Dassey’s first defense attorney requested release due to conflict of interest. His second, Len Kachinsky, was removed after he allowed Dassey to be interrogated while he attended personal business. The third (actually a team), Mark Fremgen and his assistant Ray Edelstein, subsequently represented Dassey.
The hearing started with Ken Kratz called as a defense witness. Calumet County District Attorney Kratz was one of the special prosecutors for the Steven Avery and Brendan Dassey trials.
The defense attorney Steven Drizin from Northwestern University School of Law stated that Kachinsky, while acting as Dassey’s attorney, told prosecutor Kratz about things such as trial strategy. Drizin also stated that Kratz had likely made use of this information. Unsaid was that Kratz perhaps encouraged the behavior.
Kratz testified that Dassey was not considered a suspect initially. This was an attempt to turn the interrogation sessions into interviews in order to cover up the behaviors of investigators.
The first recorded interview with Brendan Dassey on 27 February, 2006, was confrontational, and Tom Fassbender stated at the outset that Dassey was involved and that he was suffering from his involvement. The interrogators deflected or ignored statements that Dassey gave that were contrary to their desires and badgered and fed information to get statements that they wanted. Special Investigator Tom Fassbender even told Dassey what to write in a statement.
The third recorded interview, on 1 March, 2006, was the same. It was confrontational. The interrogators deflected statements that did not include what they wanted and pressured Dassey to sing their song. That included telling him what they wanted when he could not guess despite their promptings.
In all the so‑called interviews, the interrogators dominated the time and wordage. Dassey was given little time to give his statements. He was shut down repeatedly when his statements did not correspond to the State’s script.
If it walks like a duck; if it quacks like a duck; it is a duck. All four recorded interviews and the one unrecorded interview were interrogations.
When Kratz was asked about the behaviors of Kachinsky, he admitted that they were much different than any other defense attorney he worked with. Kachinsky confided about trial strategies and expected outcomes.
Kratz also admitted that he never had a defense attorney offer up a client to interrogation the way Kachinsky had. While Kratz narrowly reworded the question, he still said it was a first. This was in regard to the fourth recorded interrogation on Saturday, 13 May, 2007.
Kachinsky had justified his absence by claiming that the sixteen‑year‑old special education student could have telephoned if he had any questions. Kachinsky further stated that his investigator, Michael O’Kelly was present and that was sufficient. But, as the Memorandum makes clear, O’Kelly was antagonistic toward Dassey and the Avery family. Kachinsky was aware of this antagonism. And how is a young special education student supposed to have the experience to know when interrogators are manipulating the process?
Kachinsky was the second defense witness. He justified his actions.
When asked why he spent ten hours in media interviews before he spent an hour with his client, Kachinsky claimed he was attempting to gain public favor for his client. It may be a small point, but the public doesn’t vote in court proceedings. Further, when Brendan Dassey later passed a lie detector test, that information would have been more positive for the public than the constant claims that Steven Avery made him do the bad deeds.
I hope Kachinsky didn’t bill the Office of the Public Defender his PR time. He did bill for the time and materials of the investigator that undermined Dassey.
Kachinsky also testified that the interrogators did a good job and did not suggest anything. Kachinsky must have different transcripts than I have. In the transcripts and tapes, it is apparent the interrogators are telling Dassey what they want from the start. It is clear from the transcripts that the interrogators are even dictating to Dassey what they want in his written statements.
I had wondered during the pre‑trial period and the trial if any of the defense attorneys had spent much time with the interrogation recordings and transcripts. Even from an evidentiary viewpoint the transcripts would have been useful to attack the evidence State witnesses provided.
I spoke with a friend a while back the lopsidedness of our legal system. She asked if there was anyway to know if needed that she was getting a competent defense attorney or a stump. I responded that based upon what I was seeing she was more likely to get a stump.
Some of the talking head lawyers who commented during the original trial made me cringe. They didn’t appear to have the foggiest notion of false confessions and extraction techniques. Dassey’s first attorney stated that confessions are automatic convictions. Information about confessions and their evaluations is plentiful. In 2008, in Nebraska six people were released from their false imprisonments. All confessed to the same crime. None were involved in the crime.
After the 1991 Buddhist temple massacre in Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Tom Agnos extracted confessions from four young men and announced success. The confessions were so faulty that the men were soon released. Sheriff Agnos then used the same technique to extract confessions from two other young men who were convicted. The confession of one of the men, Jonathan Doody, was thrown out by a Federal Appeals Court in 2008.
The Doody case is referenced in the request for retrial documents.
The final set of attorneys will face questioning as well. My opinion is that none of the attorneys involved provided a competent defense. That is scary.
by Brian McCorkle
in category Brendan Dassey
