Daily Wire hosts Matt Walsh and Candace Owens spoke on Friday about the latest episode in her DailyWire+ series “Convicting a Murderer” and how shocked they were about the sympathy people have shown to convicted murderer Brendan Dassey.
Following the release on Thursday of “CAM” episode 7, the Daily Wire podcast hosts dived into why Walsh never saw Dassey as a sympathetic character unlike how he was portrayed in the hit Netflix series “Making a Murderer.”
Owen’s new 10-part series unveils the shocking truth behind one of the most controversial criminal cases in recent history. Dassey’s Uncle Steven Avery’s case was popularized by the success of the Emmy-Award-winning series, in which convicted criminal Avery was portrayed as an innocent victim of corrupt law enforcement in the murder of Teresa Halbach.
Walsh told Owens that he finds it “disturbing” when he hears people say despite seeing the evidence that proves Dassey is guilty, that he somehow shouldn’t be in prison because he was 16 or because has a low IQ.
“When you present a lot of the facts that you present in a ‘Convicting a Murderer,’ that’s when yeah, you get to the pivot where they say, well, even if he is guilty, he shouldn’t be in prison because he was 16 and all this kind of stuff,” Walsh told the host.
“And that I find pretty disturbing, considering if you’re willing to admit that he’s guilty, he’s obviously guilty as hell,” he added. “What if you are capable of doing something like that to a person at any age, it already means that you’re not fit to be free and to be out in society. And it’s a little bit like the insanity defense.”
“And in this case, they’re saying he’s not culpable because of, you know, mental stupidity, likability, mental issues, age, whatever,” Walsh continued. “Well, even then, you can make the argument that if he did that because he wasn’t culpable, then he’s even more of a danger to society because … you can’t reform that.”
Owens pointed out that on Reddit threads, people keep talking about Avery’s and Dassey’s low IQ, and she asked Walsh how that would even change things.
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“As if that changes things where we go, okay, well, I know that you raped and murdered and burned this individual, but you have a very low IQ,” she added.
“I think if you looked at the average IQ of violent criminals, it’s almost always going to be pretty low. Their average IQ is probably lower than the people who are not in prison,” Walsh replied.
Owens then showed a clip from Episode 7 of Dassey’s interrogation when he told authorities that Avery wanted him to keep raping Halbach.
Owens said it was this part that made people “really sad for Brendan” and she said it even sparked a conspiracy theory, which wasn’t true, “that the police somehow poisoned Brendan to pretend that these things happened because they wanted Stephen Avery so bad and actually had nothing to do with anything. And he was completely innocent.”
In the new series, Owens shows the portion of Dassey confessing to raping Halbach, something she said was “conveniently left out” of the Netflix series.
“And so it’s very hard for me to understand why the sympathy is being placed on Brendan and not on the 22-year-old [woman] who was brutally raped and stabbed and subsequently shot and burned in a pit in somebody’s yard,” said Owens.
Walsh agreed and said that after watching the Netflix series and hearing Dassey’s description of the murder to police, he believed his age had no bearing on his guilt or innocence.
“When I was 16, I was peer pressured to jump from the top of my friend’s roof into a wading pool,” the Daily Wire host said. “And I did it because I was kind of like 16-year-old. And it’s a very bad idea to do that … but when it comes to heinous, murderous crimes, I would think it’d be obvious to most people that that doesn’t qualify.”
Walsh said the most important part is that he believes the police and investigators involved in the case, not only “captured two murder psychopaths” but he believes “they prevented future victims.”
If you missed the DailyWire+ “Convicting a Murderer” series premiere, you can still catch up here and become a member to follow the rest of the series. The remaining episodes will debut weekly on the subscriber-based streaming service every Thursday.