After Dassey was convicted, a lower court and later a three-judge panel of an appeals court deemed Dassey’s confession involuntary. However, those decisions were nullified in December 2017 when the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld Dassey’s initial conviction by a vote of 4 to 3, meaning that Dassey would have to carry out his sentence. The three dissenting judges wrote a scathing response to the decision. “Dassey was subjected to myriad psychologically coercive techniques, but the state court did not review his interrogation with the special care required by Supreme Court precedent. His confession was not voluntary and his conviction should not stand, and yet an impaired teenager has been sentenced to life in prison,” Judge Ilana Rovner wrote