Background
John Harold Sanders was arrested without a warrant in January 2013 after bringing his three-month-old daughter to a hospital with injuries that a physician suspected resulted from abuse. The child died that evening, and an autopsy attributed her death to traumatic brain injury and classified it as a homicide. Approximately 64 hours after Sanders’s arrest, and before any judicial determination of probable cause, he waived his Miranda rights and gave police varying explanations for the injuries, including that he had shaken the child when she would not stop crying.
A jury convicted Sanders of felony murder and first-degree child abuse, but he later obtained a new trial based on ineffective assistance of counsel because his attorney had failed to seek help from a medical expert. Before the retrial, the trial court ruled that Sanders’s statements were admissible because they were voluntary under People v Cipriano, despite finding that his detention had exceeded the 48-hour limit established in Riverside County v McLaughlin. The Court of Appeals denied interlocutory review, and the Michigan Supreme Court heard argument on Sanders’s application for leave to appeal.
The Court’s Holding
In lieu of granting leave to appeal, the Michigan Supreme Court held that statements made while an arrestee is detained in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s prompt-probable-cause requirement must be suppressed unless the prosecution proves that the statements were sufficiently attenuated from the unlawful detention. Courts must consider the giving of Miranda warnings, the temporal proximity between the violation and the statements, intervening circumstances, and the purpose and flagrancy of the police misconduct. Voluntariness remains a separate threshold inquiry under Cipriano and People v Stewart, but voluntariness alone does not resolve whether statements are tainted by a Fourth Amendment violation.
The Court overruled People v Manning to the extent it treated Cipriano’s voluntariness analysis as sufficient to address statements obtained during a McLaughlin violation. Because the trial court had not conducted the required attenuation analysis, the Court vacated the order admitting Sanders’s statements and remanded for the trial court to determine their admissibility under the new standard. The Court expressed no opinion on whether the trial court’s voluntariness findings were clearly erroneous.
Justice Brian K. Zahra dissented. He would have retained Manning and the Cipriano voluntariness test, reasoning that suppression’s costs outweighed its deterrent benefits and that civil liability and exclusion of involuntary statements provided adequate alternative deterrents. He would have affirmed the trial court’s order admitting Sanders’s statements.
Key Takeaways
- A voluntary statement obtained during a detention that violates McLaughlin may still require suppression under the Fourth Amendment.
- The prosecution bears the burden of proving that a challenged statement was sufficiently attenuated from the unlawful detention.
- For an ongoing McLaughlin violation, a longer unlawful detention generally weighs against attenuation rather than in its favor.
- The decision overrules Manning in part and requires separate voluntariness and Fourth Amendment attenuation inquiries.
Why It Matters
The decision establishes a new Michigan framework for statements obtained after police hold a warrantless arrestee for more than 48 hours without a judicial probable-cause determination and without an adequate justification. Miranda warnings and a finding that a statement was voluntary do not, by themselves, cure the Fourth Amendment problem.
For trial courts and criminal practitioners, suppression disputes involving prolonged detention must now address both voluntariness and attenuation. The ruling also places particular significance on evidence of recurring police practices, such as the Lansing Police Department’s mistaken understanding that officers had 72 hours to obtain a probable-cause determination.