Opinion ID: 75071
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Use of Involuntary Confession

Text: Housel challenges the use against him at sentencing of his confession to the murder of Troy Smith. The uncontradicted evidence at Housel’s sentencing told this story about the statement: Housel volunteered to Detective Latty that he wanted to talk when Housel learned that Orange County, Texas investigators (from where Troy Smith died) had come to Gwinnett to look at Housel’s tattoos. Detective Latty refused to take a statement immediately, insisting that Housel reinitiate contact. Housel did so soon afterward by calling Latty. Latty picked Housel up at the jail and took him to the police station, where Latty informed Housel of his rights and reminded Housel 18 that Britt had been appointed to represent him. Housel declined to have Britt there, calling him a “sawed-off sonofabitch.” (Resp’t’s Ex. 12 at 1726.) Latty nonetheless tried to reach Britt at home, but he was not there, and Housel then proceeded to make a statement after signing a waiver of his rights and restating the waiver on tape. The district court determined, and Housel does not contest, that Housel’s challenge to the use of this statement at sentencing arises under the Fifth Amendment’s right to due process, rather than the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause requires that confessions be voluntary under the totality of the circumstances. Arizona v. Fulminante, 499 U.S. 279, 287, 111 S. Ct. 1246, 1252 (1991); Baldwin v. Johnson, 152 F.3d 1304, 1320-21 (11th Cir. 1998); Waldrop v. Jones, 77 F.3d 1308, 1316 (11th Cir. 1996). Voluntariness is as much a legal notion as a factual one, perhaps because part of the inquiry is whether law enforcement has “overreach[ed],” and our review of the state court’s conclusion (and the district court’s) is thus de novo. Id.; see Fulminante, 499 U.S. at 287, 111 S. Ct. at 1252; Baldwin, 152 F.3d at 1320. Housel has supplemented the uncontested trial story of his confession with three circumstances that, he argues, rendered involuntary his call to Detective Latty to 19 confess.9 Housel first accuses Latty of setting out to obtain a confession from the time that Latty brought Housel back to Georgia. The district court so found, but like the district court we think that this circumstance alone does not require suppression of the confession. Rather, Latty must have done something impermissible to extract the confession, and wanting information from a suspect is not impermissible. Housel seems to admit as much, because his second and third circumstances are, respectively, the stick and the carrot that Housel blames Latty for using to reach his goal. First, the stick: Housel points to the unusually bad treatment he received in the Gwinnett County Jail. He was held in solitary confinement, shocked with a stun gun, and denied a shower for three months, all of which caused him to behave bizarrely during his confinement. The weakness in these contentions is, as the district court found, that Housel does not have competent evidence to link them to the statement about Smith’s murder. The testimony to jail conditions was supplied by a sheriff’s deputy who started to work there after Housel had confessed. None of the affidavits — which come from other inmates at the Jail — offered as evidence of Housel’s treatment, furthermore, is pinned down sufficiently in time to know if the terrible circumstances predate the confession. The affidavits do not, furthermore, explain how 9 No one has suggested that any of the evidence first offered in federal proceedings is not properly considered, and we therefore treat all the evidence as having been properly before the district court and us. 20 the affiants have personal knowledge of how Housel was treated in solitary confinement. The carrot circumstance has no better support from the district court’s findings of historical fact. Housel says that Latty schemed to get a statement by responding to Housel’s calls and complaints about the jail, letting Housel out of his cell to talk, and offering little bribes of Burger King Whoppers and cigarettes. But again, the importance of this circumstance is undermined because the connection of this treatment to the statement is weak. The district court found that Latty had spoken to Housel only three times between Housel’s arrest and the statement. The district court found, moreover, that Latty never promised Housel anything in exchange for a statement, which makes us doubt that Latty’s favorable treatment was out of bounds in any event. It would certainly be anomalous for us to hold that a law enforcement officer may not be nice to a detainee at risk of suppression of any statement the detainee made. We thus agree with the district court that these circumstances do not overshadow the facts suggesting voluntariness, which are that Housel initiated the contact with Latty and “unequivocally waived his right to have Britt present.” (R.7-76 at 53.) The district court therefore properly rejected this claim, too.