CHICAGO, IL (WTAQ) – Brendan Dassey’s attorneys have filed a motion, asking for their client to be immediately released from custody.
On Thursday, a federal appeals court upheld an August 2016 decision that overturned Dassey’s conviction for the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach.
The court gave the state of Wisconsin until 5 pm Monday to file a response.
“There is no longer any reason to further stay the district court’s order releasing Mr. Dassey. Even after the district court ordered his release in November, he has waited behind bars for seven additional months while the State pursued its appeal to this Court. And his waiting is not necessarily nearing its end: despite two courts that now have awarded habeas relief, the Respondent could nonetheless prolong Brendan’s time in prison by months, if not years, by taking its allotted ninety days to decide to release him – or by seeking en banc rehearing, which if granted in such a fact-intensive case would consume an extraordinary amount of time and resources by requiring every active judge of this Court to repeat the three-judge panel’s word-by-word review of several multi-hour interrogation tapes, along with hundreds of pages of interrogation transcripts and thousands of pages of state-court records, not to mention the district court’s 91-page opinion and this Court’s 128-page opinion. Weighed against this irrecoverable loss of time, it is undeniable that “every day Petitioner spends in prison compounds the substantial harm that he has suffered on account of imprisonment based upon an unconstitutional conviction.” … Brendan Dassey therefore respectfully asks this Court to lift the stay of the district court’s order releasing him and issue any other such orders as may be necessary to give immediate effect to the district court’s order releasing him on recognizance,” wrote attorney Laura Nirider in the six-page brief.
The state issued the following statement in response:
“While Dassey’s legal team is free to file any motion they desire, Wisconsin DOJ intends to seek review of yesterday’s 2-1 decision by the entire 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and by the United States Supreme Court, if necessary. Because this case is far from being concluded in the appellate courts and we are confident that Dassey’s convictions for rape and murder will be upheld, there is no avenue for him to be released at this time.”
Read the full motion, courtesy of Fox 11, here.
