MAYBE Brendan Dassey would be a free man if we knew then what we know now.

Dassey, 25, was convicted of the Wisconsin murder and sexual assault of Teresa Halbach when he was 17.

The case, which was chronicled in the 10-part Netflix documentary seriesMaking a Murderer, was turned on its head when Dassey confessed to police his role in the brutal crime.

Dassey later retracted his confession, but it was too late. He was sentenced to life in prison with the earliest possible chance of parole in 2048, when he will be 58 years old.

His actions left viewers asking the question: Why would anybody admit to their part in a crime they did not commit? New research might finally have the answer.

‘DON’T PRESS THE ESCAPE KEY’

In a landmark study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers have for the first time, they say, conclusively linked confessions with sleep deprivation.

They say severe exhaustion is the number one reason people make false confessions and they hope their paper will be cited in future court cases just like Brendan Dassey’s.

According to New Scientist, false confessions play a role in 25 per cent of wrongful convictions in the United States. Lawrence Sherman, head of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, says the new study is “a milestone”. So what did researchers do?

Steven Frendaa, Shari Berkowitzb, Elizabeth Loftusc and Kimberly Fenng used university students as guinea pigs in an experiment never tried before.

Eighty-eight participants from Michigan State University aged between 18-23 were asked to complete computer-based tasks across multiple sessions. They were repeatedly warned not to press the ‘Escape’ key on their keyboard because doing so would interrupt the study.

In their final session, participants either slept all night in laboratory bedrooms or remained awake all night. In the morning, all participants were asked to sign a statement summarising their activities in the laboratory.

On the statement, all participants were accused of pressing the Escape key during an earlier session. After being asked once, the odds of confessing were 4.5 times higher for sleep-deprived participants than for those who slept soundly through the night. The waters were so muddied by their fatigue they were convinced they did something they never did.

The research will likely come as no great surprise to police, particularly in the US, where sleep deprivation has been used widely as an interview technique.

It’s not the case elsewhere around the world, including in the UK, where it is illegal for police to interview people who have not had eight hours’ sleep in the past 24 hours.

The tide is turning in the US where, in 2015, there were more exonerations (149) than in any other year. Those who had their convictions dropped had served on average 14.5 years in prison for a crime they didn’t commit, according to The National Registry of Exonerations.

4AM CONFESSION LANDS INNOCENT MAN IN JAIL

Damon Thibodeaux knows what it’s like to confess to a crime he didn’t commit.

The Louisiana native spent 15 years on death row after confessing to the rape and murder of his 14-year-old cousin, Crystal Champagne, in 1996. He did so despite having nothing to do with it.

In 2012, following an appeals process supported by The Innocence Project, Thibodeaux was released. DNA evidence cleared him, at which time the spotlight shone directly on the police who elicited a false confession.

Detectives were convinced the then-22-year-old was guilty. They told him he was lying when he protested his innocence. Then they began describing what would happen to him if he kept lying.

Detectives described to him in detail what would happen to his body if he was given the lethal injection, according to The Guardian.

“They described to me death by lethal injection: organs collapsing, the brain shutting down, extreme pain. That’s what they said would happen to me if I didn’t give them what they wanted.”

So he did. He caved, but when he caved it was 4am and he’d been without meaningful sleep for 35 hours. It followed nine hours of interrogations.

Michelle Murphy was another victim of America’s justice system gone wrong. Murphy, 38, from Oklahoma, found her son’s lifeless body on the kitchen floor of her home in 1994. The baby boy, just 15 weeks old, had been stabbed multiple times.

After hours of interrogations, Murphy was coerced into claiming she accidentally killed her baby when she knelt down to pick up a knife. In reality, an unknown male was responsible, according to DNA evidence.

The Innocence Project website declares Murphy confessed to the murder after hours of interrogation. Her false confession was not uncovered until 20 years later. In 2014, she was exonerated.

In 2015, 27 Americans were exonerated for convictions based on false confessions. Researchers hope their study will lead to more exonerations in the short term and a change in the way police interrogate suspects in the longer term.

“Depriving a suspect of sleep — whether intentionally as part of an interrogation strategy or incidentally as the result of a lengthy interrogation — may compromise the reliability of evidence obtained from an innocent suspect in an interrogation and put innocent suspects at increased risk,” the study’s authors wrote.

“To this end, our findings provide an additional justification for the importance of videotaping all interrogations, thus providing judges, attorneys, experts, and jurors with additional opportunities to evaluate the probative value of any confession that is obtained.”