Steven Avery’s lawyer Kathleen Zellner is teasing the media and “Making a Murderer” fans again, this time tweeting about the pending release of her client’s co-defendant and nephew Brendan Dassey, then deleting the tweet shortly after.
According to local Wisconsin news outlet WBAY, Zellner, who doesn’t represent Dassey, tweeted a picture on Thursday evening of Ryan Ferguson, a man she helped exonerate after he was wrongly convicted of murder in Missouri. In the picture, Ferguson holds a sign saying “It is over,” mimicking the text of the attorney’s tweet.
However, the tweet has since been deleted. On Friday morning, Zellner once again took to Twitter, tweeting, “The Wisc AG has only one moral, just and righteous decision to make for BD: Let him go — it is over.”
https://twitter.com/ZellnerLaw/status/771574780726083584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
However, a spokesperson from the Wisconsin Department of Justice denied all media speculation about the fate of Dassey, who was convicted along with Avery in the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach.
“I am aware of the rumors floating out there, and there is no truth to them. There is nothing new to share today,” DOJ spokesperson Johnny Koremenos told WBAY.
Attorney General Brad Schimel also spoke with WISN in Milwaukee on Thursday, adding, “I’m not prepared to make any announcements on that yet. We have made some decisions, but I’m not prepared to announce that right now.”
On Aug. 12, federal magistrate judge William E. Duffin granted Dassey’s writ for a petition of habeas corpus, finding that Dassey’s imprisonment was unlawful because his confession to the murder of Halbach was involuntary.
In reaching that decision, Duffin wrote that the “misconduct” of Len Kachinsky, Dassey’s court-appointed attorney, was “indefensible.”
Dassey, who is now 26, was convicted in 2007 of first-degree intentional homicide, second-degree sexual assault and mutilation of a corpse in Halbach’s murder. His lawyers filed his writ of habeas corpus in 2014.