Who is Laura Nirider? Making a Murderer season 2 lawyer for Brendan Dassey
Here's what you need to know about lawyer Laura Nirider
THE trials of Brendan Dassey and his uncle Steven Avery gained global attention after the release of Netflix documentary Making a Murderer in 2015.
Lawyer Laura Nirider has worked tirelessly for her client Brendan Dassey - here's what you need to know.
Who is Laura Nirider?
Laura Nirider is a lawyer and the co-director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth.
Nirider represents individuals who were wrongfully convicted of crimes when they were children or teenagers and specialises in areas such as confessions and police interrogations.
Her clients include Brendan Dassey, whose case was profiled in the Netflix Global series Making a Murderer, and Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three, whose case was profiled in the documentary West of Memphis.
On her , Nirider says: "My responsibilities include representing wrongfully convicted youth, co-teaching a clinical course on wrongful convictions of youth, and directing the Center’s mission and work.
"Both my courtroom work and classroom work focus on police interrogations and confessions.
"I maintain an ongoing caseload of post-conviction cases involving individuals who were convicted as children or adolescents. The majority of my clients’ cases involve confessions."
She told in 2016 that she is married with two children.
She said: "It’s also important for me to connect with my family because it helps me remember that the clients I’m serving have their own families who need me to fight for them as hard as I possibly can."
What has she said about Brendan Dassey?
When the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Brendan Dassey’s case, Nirider: “Brendan was a sixteen-year old with intellectual and social disabilities when he confessed to a crime he did not commit.
"The video of Brendan’s interrogation shows a confused boy who was manipulated by experienced police officers into accepting their story of how the murder of Teresa Halbach happened."
On Twitter she added that courts don't understand that confessions can be "coerced without extreme tactics".
She said: "This reality — that confessions can be coerced even without “extreme” tactics or ill intent, is understood by psychologists and law enforcement leaders — but courts still don’t get it.
"And people like Brendan are paying for it. Time to make some change."
She added in a later Tweet: "It doesn’t take abuse to get a kid to confess falsely; implied promises of leniency and false friend tactics are risky too. And it doesn’t require police misconduct either; even well-intentioned cops can inadvertently induce a false confession."
What's the latest for Brendan Dassey?
The trials of Dassey and his uncle Steven Avery gained global attention after the release of Netflix documentary Making a Murderer, which cast doubt on the legal processes used to convict them.
Photographer Teresa Halbach disappeared in 2005, after visiting the Avery family salvage yard in Twin Rivers.
Dassey was initially interviewed as a witness in the investigation into his uncle.
But police contacted Brendan again after his cousin Kayla said he had discussed the murder with her.
In March 2006 he was arrested and charged with being party to first-degree murder, sexual assault, and mutilation of a corpse, and was convicted in April 2007 after a nine-day trial.
During interrogations by the police he confessed in detail to helping Avery carry out the rape, killing and dismemberment of Halbach.
His confession was used as the foundation of Dassey's trial, which lacked physical evidence linking him to the murder.
But in June 2006 he recanted his admission in a letter to the judge, claiming he had been coerced and that he had taken most of the ideas from a book. He never testified against Avery.
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Dassey was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole in 2048.
Following the release of Making a Murderer in December 2015, Dassey's legal team filed a lawsuit claiming he had been illegally arrested and imprisoned.
A judge overturned Dassey's conviction in August 2016, ruling that investigators took advantage of the then-16-year-old Dassey's cognitive disabilities and tricked him into confessing.
His attorneys argued that Dassey's confession was coerced by investigators who used improper techniques while interrogating a juvenile with a low IQ.
They claimed that investigators made false promises to Dassey that he would be released if he told them about the killing.
A federal magistrate overturned Dassey's conviction, saying repeated false promises by detectives, when considered with other factors like Dassey's age, intellectual deficits and the absence of a supportive adult, led him to determine that Dassey's confession was involuntary under the US Constitution.
However, prosecutors appealed to a US Appeals Court which upheld the conviction in a 4-3 ruling that found the confession to be voluntary.
On June 25, 2018, the Supreme Court Justices agreed not to review the Appeals Court ruling - but no reason was provided for the decision.
A second series of Making A Murderer released in October 2018 is set to reveal fresh evidence including a mystery phone call.
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