Whether a statement to a corrections officer made by an individual who has just attempted suicide while in custody is 'voluntary' when the prison has denied his request for counsel for more than 11 hours and engaged in physically and psychologically coercive conduct that has exacerbated his continuing mental health crisis

Davone Anderson was arrested at 4:04 a.m. on July 31, 2020 on charges of receiving stolen property and unauthorized use of firearms. In actually, police suspected him of murder. He immediately asked for a lawyer. Eleven hours later, in a booking cell at the county jail, Mr. Anderson had not been provided counsel. Sobbing in his cell and denied an opportunity to call his mother because of the prison’s delay in processing his arrest, Mr. Anderson tried to kill himself. He was forcibly stripped, redressed in an anti-suicide “turtle suit,” and removed to a suicide-proof dry cell with no water and no toilet. He had not slept in days, a period during which he had taken drugs including ecstasy and marijuana. He believed the guards and the police were trying to kill him. Restrained in the turtle suit and still unrepresented, Mr. Anderson told a corrections officer he had something to confess. Though Mr. Anderson had not asked to speak to police, the officer called the detectives who were investigating two shootings they believed he had committed. With the police on their way, Mr. Anderson told the C.O. that he had “killed them both.” Not only was Mr. Anderson suicidal, detectives observed that he was emotionally unstable and “fuckin’ nuts.” They interrogated him three times over the course of the next four hours, ultimately extracting a second confession at the start of the physically intrusive execution of a search warrant for his DNA and for possible gunshot residue after having him involuntarily returned from the prison medical unit. Calling the detectives’ actions a “blatant violation” of Mr. Anderson’s rights, the trial court suppressed all statements made in the first two interviews by detectives, all statements after the execution of the search warrants in the third interview, and all statements made in a fourth attempted interview in a police cruiser the next day when detectives removed Mr. Anderson from the prison in an attempt to persuade him to lead them to the murder weapon. However, it ruled that the initial statement to the C.O. and the confession to detectives as they were preparing to execute the search warrants were “voluntary” and not given in response to police questioning. The questions presented are: 1. Whether a statement to a corrections officer made by an individual who has just attempted suicide while in custody is “voluntary” when the prison has denied his request for counsel for more than 11 hours and engaged in physically and psychologically coercive conduct that has exacerbated his continuing mental health crisis. 2. Whether statements made at a third police interview of an individual in mental health crisis who has been denied counsel for 16½ hours and has been physically relocated from the prison medical unit to the same interview room in which he has already been subjected to two prior blatantly unconstitutional interrogations by the same detectives are inherently involuntary custodial statements. See Colorado v. Connelly, 479 U.S. 157 (1986); Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 460 (1966).