Alison Dirr

USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin

CHICAGO - The heartbreak many "Making a Murderer" viewers felt while watching Brendan Dassey's videotaped confession to the murder of Teresa Halbach was familiar to the lead attorney on his case.

For Laura Nirider, though, that sinking feeling came nearly a decade ago.

Nirider was a third-year law student at the Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law when she was given videos from Dassey's case to review.

"I didn't know much about the criminal justice system. And I took them home and I popped them into my laptop, and I watched them — and my heart broke," Nirider told USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin. "To see someone as vulnerable as Brendan giving a confession that was so weak and so coerced and then at the end of it to watch him be led out of that room to a prison cell, where I knew he still was, was heartbreaking."

It was life-changing for her — and has been for Dassey, too, now that his conviction has been overturned. Dassey's uncle, Steven Avery, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for Halbach's homicide, is also challenging his conviction.

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After she graduated in the spring of 2008 and took a job outside Northwestern, Nirider kept working on the case. Soon, she came back to the university, this time to join the new Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth. It is one of the centers under the umbrella of the law school's Bluhm Legal Clinic, which works on cases while giving law students real experience in the legal realm.

She is now co-director at the center, which has continued to press forward on Dassey's appeal. On Aug. 12, U.S. Magistrate Judge William Duffin overturned Dassey's conviction, ruling that his confession was involuntary.

Nirider has worked on the case primarily with Steven Drizin, assistant dean at the university's Bluhm Legal Clinic, and Wisconsin attorney Robert J. Dvorak — along with other attorneys and students throughout the semesters.

Nirider and Drizin sat down in late August with USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin at the law school in downtown Chicago to talk about their work, the center and the Dassey case.

While the attorneys have become internationally known for their work on Dassey's appeal, their efforts are much broader. In addition to case work, they're teachers and advocates for change in the criminal justice system.

In pushing for change, their efforts are aimed at public education and collaboration with members of the justice system. Their goals: preventing wrongful convictions and working on cases of those who are incarcerated.

"They want interrogators to be involved,” Katie Marie Zouhary, who spent her last three semesters in law school at the center, said of Nirider and Drizin. "I think they see value in all actors in our justice system being involved in this cause, which is eliminating false confessions from minors and not putting them in that situation to begin with.”

'What you see is what you get'

Zouhary is pleased to see the international spotlight on their work with the release of "Making a Murderer" on Netflix, but said publicity was never the goal for those involved in getting Dassey's conviction overturned.

Nirider, Drizin, Dvorak and Bluhm Legal Clinic Director Thomas Geraghty appeared in the first season of "Making a Murderer." Nirider and Drizin said they have been interviewed for the second season. For them, the publicity has been an opportunity for a teachable moment.

But the case was at the front of their minds long before the world watched the series.

Criminal and juvenile defense attorneys in Wisconsin contacted Drizin about the case in October 2007 — just a couple months after Dassey was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of extended supervision until 2048.

Drizin took the case because he "respected the people who asked me to take the case, but as I dug deeper, I felt that the Center could help Brendan and thought it would be a good case for Northwestern’s students to work on," he wrote on Northwestern's website.

But it was meeting Dassey that convinced him to take the case, he wrote. Asked what it was about this meeting, he said simply, "With Brendan, what you see is what you get." He is the person viewers saw on the series, Drizin said.

"Incredibly gentle," Nirider echoed.

The center accepted Dassey's case in 2008.

Nirider's great strength, Drizin said, is in organizing large quantities of information. She mastered the facts of the case, which was critical in effectively representing Dassey, Drizin said.

"One of the things we did when we looked at this case was we had to know what information the police had gathered in their investigation prior to interrogating Brendan," Drizin said. "What was their knowledge base, and did Brendan give them any information that they didn't already know about? And that required going through thousands of pages of documents."

It was a process in which students' contributions were integral.

Now, the center's efforts have changed the trajectory of Dassey's case.

On Aug. 12, Duffin found that the confession Dassey gave as a teenager on March 1, 2006, was involuntary. That confession was functionally the "entirety of the case against him on each of the three counts," Duffin wrote on the 89th page of his 91-page decision.

But it was the 90th page that Drizin first scrolled to when they got the news that Friday, just to make sure they weren't dreaming. Habeas petitions are granted rarely, after all.

"IT IS THEREFORE ORDERED that Brendan Dassey's petition for a writ of habeas corpus is GRANTED," Duffin wrote. "The respondent shall release Dassey from custody unless, within 90 days of the date of this decision, the State initiates proceedings to retry him."

Nirider was at home with her children when she got an automated email announcing that the petition had been granted. She was in shock — it was something they had been working toward her entire legal career — and had tears in her eyes as she dialed Drizin.

The most important takeaway, Nirider said, was that Duffin wrote that he had "significant doubts" about the reliability of Dassey's confession.

"We're not just talking about legal technicalities here," she said.

They are now waiting for the state of Wisconsin to decide what its next step will be.

Compassion for the convicted

The attorneys are a lifeline and a ray of hope to many of their clients, said Alison Flaum, legal director of the Children and Family Justice Center at the Bluhm Legal Clinic.

"Their passion comes, I think, from their compassion"— not from a desire to override the other side, Flaum said of Drizin and Nirider.

They're committed, she said, to understanding the perspectives of other people, whether that's the person being interrogated or the interrogator. Their humility and efforts to see the other side prevents them from falling into an "us-versus-them" mentality.

"They don't presume bad faith," Flaum said. "On the contrary, they presume good faith and they think, 'why would someone who was genuinely trying to solve this crime do X or do Y. Where is that motivation coming from? Where is there a flaw in the protocol or ... are there issues with regard to training that can be addressed? Is there common ground that can be a starting point?'"

Dassey's was one of the first cases the team at the Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth took on when it began in 2008.

Its offices are interspersed with colleagues who work for different centers and have different areas of expertise. The focus of the other centers range from international human rights, to environmental advocacy, to children and family justice.

There is a sense of collaboration on the floor where the various centers are based. Pictures of smiling exonerees hang on the cheerful yellow walls and newspaper clippings are taped to doors.

Despite the difficult subject matter, there is a positive vibe and a strong sense that the system can be improved.

The law students get real-world experience on tough, high-stakes cases, but they also make real contributions to the center's work.

"One of the things that we are lucky to have is a new crop of students every semester to sort of bring a jolt of energy to us and to the case," Drizin said. "So even during periods where we have to wait for courts to rule, we are energized by the passion of young people who look at this case and urge us forward."

Nirider and Drizin treat students as equals in the work — and that means a lot, said Zouhary, who now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She drafted motions and briefs, did substantive research and conducted interviews in prison. She did not realize at first how invested she would become in the work.

Their passion for the work and for justice is infectious, she said, and she felt the weight of the cases they handled.

"This is the difference between freedom and being locked up for the rest of your life," Zouhary said. "The consequences of our actions are so significant in these cases.”

Working with Nirider and Drizin gave her traits to emulate as an attorney: be prepared, know the law, become a relationship-builder and pursue justice.

Educational component

In addition to cases and their work with students, the group files briefs with courts around the country to educate judges. It also works with members of the criminal justice system to address thorny issues faced by children in the system.

One such example is a guide co-written with the International Association of Chiefs of Police on how to reduce the risk of eliciting false confessions from juveniles.

The concept of a false confession is counter-intuitive, a huge mental hurdle: Why would someone confess to something they didn't do — sometimes in considerable detail?

It's a question that confronted Drizin when he represented a boy in the 1990s who confessed to murder only to later recant. Drizin said he didn't believe the boy when he said he had confessed to a crime he didn't commit.

"I didn't understand how anyone could confess to a homicide in such brutal detail, and so I had to learn," he said.

He contacted three leading experts on false confessions in the country. They mentored and educated him, and he used one of them as an expert in the case, he said.

Today, there is growing awareness of false confessions due in large part to the development of DNA technology that can prove the innocence of someone who confessed, Nirider said.

The work the pair has done has focused a conversation about who kids really are, said colleague Shobha Mahadev, a clinical assistant professor of law at the Children and Family Justice Center. That gives her hope.

It's not a 9-to-5 job.

"We demand a lot of each other and of our students," Drizin said. "But we work in a clinic where the expectations are high and many of the law professors see our case work as a window into reforming the criminal justice system."

Alison Dirr: 920-996-7266 or adirr@gannett.com; on Twitter @AlisonDirr