Brendan Dassey Case Summary

Brendan Dassey, a 16-year-old teenager with intellectual and developmental disabilities, confessed to a crime he allegedly committed with his uncle Steven Avery. While Dassey confessed and was convicted of the murder, his confession has been widely criticized as coerced and unreliable. The issue this brief aims to focus on is the role of age, vulnerability, and how it can lead to false confessions from juveniles, such as Dassey. Unfortunately, Dassey is not the only victim of giving a false confession due to their young age and the inability to understand what is happening to them during an interrogation. Research has shown that juveniles are especially susceptible to making false confessions due to their developmental stage and heightened

Dassey’s case exemplifies these vulnerabilities. His age and intellectual limitations made him more susceptible to the coercive techniques employed by the police. As a 16-year-old with significant developmental disabilities, Dassey lacked the maturity, cognitive capacity, and understanding of legal rights and processes that would have enabled him to navigate the interrogation without influence. The intersection of developmental psychology and the dynamics of police interrogations is crucial for assessing the reliability of confessions obtained from juveniles. This brief explores the psychological research on false confessions, focusing particularly on how coercive interrogation techniques impact young and intellectually underdeveloped individuals. Examining these factors can make it easier to understand the inherent risks of obtaining confessions from vulnerable populations and the need for legal safeguards to prevent miscarriages of justice. From a very early age, society emphasizes the importance of trusting and following the guidance of authority figures, especially law enforcement

Moreover, due to these trust and police interrogation techniques, it is not difficult for juveniles to be put in situations where they are being manipulated into thinking that their only and best option is to confess to a crime. The Reid Technique and the use of maximization and minimization interrogation methods “rely on tactics such as lying, deception, and the contamination error to manipulate suspects into confessing” (Luna, 2018) and are applied regardless of the suspect's age. While adults may be more capable of recognizing these law enforcement tactics, such as fake sympathy followed by psychological manipulation, juveniles are less experienced and more likely to trust law enforcement officials. Consequently, they are less able to detect and resist these deceptive practices. Furthermore, a significant topic in the research on false confessions is whether the suspect understands their Miranda