Dassey isn't on Gov. Evers' latest list of pardons. Here's why Barry Scheck says he should be.

Byline: Michaela Paukner, mpaukner@wislawjournal.com

Gov. Tony Evers issued another round of pardons over the weekend. Missing among the list of those pardoned Brendan Dassey.

Dassey, a subject of the Netflix series "Making a Murderer," confessed that he and his uncle, Steven Avery, raped and murdered the photographer Teresa Halbach in Manitowoc County in 2005. Dassey was then 16 years old. He and Avery were convicted in 2007 and have been serving life sentences since.

Dassey's lawyers filed a petition for clemency in early October, asking Evers to pardon him or commutate his life sentence. Nearly 250 people signed an open letter supporting his petition, many of whom are retired U.S. government officials, legal experts and exonerees. Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, was one of them.

Scheck calledDassey collateral damage in the case against Avery. He said Dassey's intellectual challenges made him vulnerable to investigators' interrogation tactics.

"It's not a dispute as to whether or not the interrogators fed Brendan facts and leading questions he could just say yes to," Scheck said.

Scheck questioned the voluntariness and reliability of Dassey's taped confession to Manitowoc County interrogators.

"(This confession) has all the earmarks to be not only involuntary but obviously unreliable," Scheck said. "Brendan Dassey spending the rest of his life in prison would be an outrageous injustice. We have an obligation to speak out and see if we can correct this injustice."

Evers has not said if he'll pardon Dassey. There is no deadline for him to take such an action.

The Wisconsin Law Journal talked to Scheck about endorsing Dassey's petition for clemency and the admissibility of confessions.

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Wisconsin Law Journal: What do you see as the issues with the admissibility of Dassey's confession?

Barry Scheck: There is a case that the United States Supreme Court decided that said that in the interest of federal constitutional law, when you're violating the admissibility of the confession, you look only to whether it was "involuntarily made." You do not look to if it was "reliable."

Anybody that studies this field agrees that you not only look at factors that go to whether an interrogation is voluntary, but you also look to whether or not the confession is reliable. Reliability really comes down to number one: Are the facts being elicited from the suspect known to the police and the real perpetrator, or is this something...