Episode 2: He Said He Did It: Brendan Dassey

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Description

He said he did it.

And if you only hear the confession, it sounds believable. But when you look at how the details actually emerged, something changes. A sixteen-year-old boy with learning disabilities was questioned for hours. No attorney. No parent in the room. By the end of it, he had confessed to something the physical evidence never connected him to. This episode asks how an innocent person comes to confess, and what that tells us about a system that treats a confession as its most powerful evidence.

Gibson, a town in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin (View Map)

Sources

Gallini, Brian. "The Interrogations of Brendan Dassey." Marquette Law Review, vol. 102, no. 3, 2019, pp. 777–838. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3249221

Kassin, Saul M., and Katherine L. Kiechel. "The Social Psychology of False Confessions: Compliance, Internalization, and Confabulation." Psychological Science, vol. 7, no. 3, 1996, pp. 125–128.