Incumbent Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker is a career politician with an implacably hard-line stance on clemency. As the Wisconsin Gubernatorial election looms on November 6th, criminal justice reform is on the bill. With an assortment of public interest stakeholders including lobbyists, Walkers opponent Tony Ever's and the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin touting for change, Walker’s 1990’s ‘truth-in-sentencing’ laws no longer hold relevancy in a system fractured at the legislative hip. Truth-in-Sentencing Walkers refusal to endorse the ‘right on crime’ agenda of decriminalisation, reduced sentencing and alternatives to incarceration can be traced back to the young Republican
In late 2015, the docuseries Making a Murderer premiered on Netflix, quickly becoming a worldwide sensation. The series featured the case of Brendan Dassey, a client of the Bluhm Legal Clinic’s Center on Wrongful Convictions of Youth (CWCY), who was convicted alongside his uncle Steven Avery in the 2005 murder of Teresa Halbach. Northwestern Law Professors Steven Drizin and Laura Nirider have represented Dassey since 2007, when Nirider was a Northwestern Law student. Over the years, dozens of Clinic faculty, students, and alumni have worked to free Dassey, who was coerced as a 16-year-old into falsely confessing to the crime. On October 19, Netflix will release Making a Murderer: Part Two, w
