Bulletin: ‘Making a Murderer’ series: Part 8: Roundtable – Episodes 2 & 3 (Note: Spoilers!): "the second installment of Innocence Project of Florida’s (IPF) roundtable discussion on Making a Murderer. The second episode, “Turning the Tables,” and the third episode, “Plight of the Accused” are covered. Once again, the discussion will first give a recap of what happened in each episode, then IPF’s executive director, Seth Miller, and intake coordinator, Dr. Adina M. Thompson, will discuss the episodes."

"This week we bring you the second installment of Innocence Project of Florida’s (IPF) roundtable discussion on Making a Murderer. The second episode, “Turning the Tables,” and the third episode, “Plight of the Accused” are covered. Once again, the discussion will first give a recap of what happened in each episode, then IPF’s executive director, Seth Miller, and intake coordinator, Dr. Adina M. Thompson, will discuss the episodes. " SM:The lack of blood at the scene is one factor strongly suggesting Dassey’s confession was false and fabricated. Given the universal agreement that Avery wasn’t very sophisticated and the general disarray of his trailer, it is implausible that such a gruesome and violent murder could have occurred in the trailer and no blood from the victim would have been deposited–even with the best and most sophisticated effort to scrub the scene of any such blood. What is so odd about Dassey’s confession is that when someone is as limited as Dassey and so susceptible to a false confession, the facts fed to the confessor by the interrogators are usually at least consistent with the physical evidence as it is known. Here, Dassey’s explanation of how the murder occurred was wildly at odds with what the law enforcement officials were actually seeing at the scene. Situations like this, where the confessor is providing known false facts, is a tell-tale sign that they are falsely confessing and simply making stuff up. Yet, the interrogators here were very willing to accept Dassey’s amazing story probably because their tunnel vision was squarely focused on Avery and they were unconcerned with information that undermined their preconceived notions about the case AT: I would venture that it isn’t only the lack of blood that compromised Dassey’s confession. There is a set of factors that combined to make this a dangerous situation with conditions ripe for a false confession to happen. Some things that may increase the likelihood of a false confession that were present in Dassey’s case include: age, in that children may be more likely to falsely confess than adults; mental acuity, in that people with lower IQs may be more likely to confess than people with higher IQs; and custody, in that children who do not have a parent, guardian or attorney present may be more likely to make a false statement. When those factors are combined with the fact that investigators asked Dassey leading questions (“Who shot her in the head?”) after he failed to introduce the facts independently, AND the fact that Dassey continued to change his story to please his interviewers…well, it’s a dangerous situation. A false confession is of course possible. As Seth pointed out, the story Dassey told about slitting Halbach’s throat does not line up with the evidence collected from the location where that supposedly happened, which only adds to my suspicion about this confession. For more information about false confession and admission, I suggest reading work by Dr. Saul Kassin of John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He’s one of the people doing cutting-edge social science research in this area. Of course, I can’t say for certain whether Dassey falsely confessed or not. I can only identify the risk factors. SM: While anything is possible, I’ll go out on a limb and posit that Dassey’s admission was in fact a false confession." Go to the following link for the entire 'roundtable.'
http://floridainnocence.org/content/?p=12342