People v Sanders
Key claim: Statements obtained from an arrestee detained more than 48 hours without a judicial probable-cause determination must be suppressed unless the prosecution proves they were sufficiently attenuated from the Fourth Amendment violation.
Abstract
Michigan Supreme Court opinion decided 2026-07-30. Michigan Supreme Court Lansing, Michigan
Syllabus Chief Justice: Justices: Megan K. Cavanagh Brian K. Zahra Richard H. Bernstein Elizabeth M. Welch Kyra H. Bolden Kimberly A. Thomas Noah P. Hood
This syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been Reporter of Decisions: prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. Kimberly K. Muschong
PEOPLE v SANDERS
Docket No. 167899. Argued on application for leave to appeal March 12, 2026. Decided
July 30, 2026.
In 2013, John H. Sanders was convicted following a jury trial in the Ingham Circuit Court
of felony murder and first-degree child abuse. Earlier that year, defendant took his three-month-
old daughter to the hospital after she stopped breathing. The examining physician suspected that
the child’s injuries were the result of inflicted abuse. While the child remained in the hospital in
critical condition, defendant agreed to participate in an interview with detectives from the Lansing
Police Department. Defendant repeatedly denied responsibility when the officers either implicitly
or directly accused him of harming his daughter. The officers arrested defendant without a warrant
and kept him in custody, and the child died that evening. The next day, while defendant remained
in detention, a doctor performed an autopsy and concluded that the cause of death was a traumatic
brain injury and the manner of death was homicide.
Two days later, defendant waived his Miranda 1 rights and agreed to speak with a detective.
Defendant initially denied harming his daughter but later gave varying explanations for the cause
of her injuries, including that he shook her when she would not stop crying. At the time defendant
made these statements, he had been detained for at least 64 hours without a judicial determination
of probable cause. A magistrate later that day authorized a criminal complaint against defendant
upon a finding of probable cause.
In 2019, defendant filed in the trial court a motion for relief from judgment. The court,
Rosemarie E. Aquilina, J., granted the motion on the basis that defendant’s trial attorney had been
ineffective for failing to seek the assistance of a medical expert regarding the child’s cause of
death. During proceedings before the second trial, an evidentiary hearing was held on the
prosecution’s motion to admit the statements that defendant had made to the detective; the
detective testified that, in 2013, it was his understanding, and the practice of the Lansing Police
Department, that a suspect arrested without a warrant had to be brought before a magistrate within
72 hours. The court granted the prosecution’s motion, concluding that although defendant was
detained in violation of the Fourth Amendment under Riverside Co v McLaughlin, 500 US 44
1
Miranda v Arizona, 384 US 436 (1966).
(1991)—which held that an unconstitutional seizure occurs when the police detain an individual for more than 48 hours following a warrantless arrest without a neutral magistrate’s determination that probable cause exists, unless the prosecution proves the existence of a bona fide emergency or other extraordinary circumstance—the statements were voluntary under the factors outlined in People v Cipriano, 431 Mich 315 (1988), and therefore admissible. Defendant sought interlocutory leave to appeal in the Court of Appeals, which denied the application. Defendant sought leave to appeal in the Supreme Court, which ordered and heard oral argument on the application. ___ Mich ___; 18 NW3d 511 (2025).
In an opinion by Justice BOLDEN, joined by Chief Justice CAVANAGH and Justices
BERNSTEIN, WELCH, THOMAS, and HOOD, the Supreme Court, in lieu of granting leave to appeal, held:
1. Statements made by a detained arrestee while seized in violation of the Fourth
Amendment’s requirement of a prompt judicial determination of probable cause must be excluded from evidence unless the prosecution establishes that the statements were sufficiently attenuated from the taint of the unconstitutional conduct. Application of the exclusionary rule is appropriate under these circumstances because it would appreciably deter police misconduct. In determining whether suppression is required, a reviewing court should consider whether Miranda rights were read, the temporal proximity between the constitutional violation and the challenged statements, the presence of intervening circumstances, and the purpose and flagrancy of the police misconduct. The voluntariness of the statements is a separate threshold inquiry guided by the totality of the circumstances and the factors discussed in Cipriano and People v Stewart, 512 Mich 472 (2023). While the Cipriano factors incorporate the length of detention and the delay in bringing a defendant before a magistrate, they do so only through the lens of determining whether a confession was freely and voluntarily made in the context of the Fifth Amendment, not in the context of the Fourth Amendment. People v Manning, 243 Mich App 615 (2000), was overruled to the extent it concluded that Cipriano’s totality-of-the-circumstances voluntariness inquiry sufficiently accounts for the Fourth Amendment interests at play when a defendant arrested without a warrant is detained for more than 48 hours without a probable-cause determination.
2. Because the trial court in this case did not consider whether the statements made by
defendant were sufficiently attenuated from the taint of the McLaughlin violation, the trial court’s order granting the prosecution’s motion to admit the statements was vacated and the case was remanded for the trial court to apply the appropriate standards. It was uncontested that defendant’s right to be free from unreasonable seizure was violated under McLaughlin because he was detained for more than 48 hours following a warrantless arrest without receiving a judicial determination of probable cause, and the delay was unjustified. The detective’s belief that officers had 72 hours to bring a suspect arrested without a warrant before a judge for a probable-cause determination was contrary to McLaughlin’s clear rule, and such a plain legal error is not an extraordinary circumstance justifying delay. An attenuation analysis was appropriate to determine whether the statements made while defendant was wrongfully detained were traceable to the Fourth Amendment violation under McLaughlin, or instead whether the taint of illegality had been purged.
Trial court order vacated; case remanded for further proceedings.
Justice ZAHRA, dissenting, disagreed with the majority’s conclusion that the exclusionary- rule analysis was required because of the Fourth Amendment McLaughlin violation. Instead, the voluntariness inquiry established in Cipriano would adequately protect the integrity of the process and the statements obtained during the interrogation. The exclusionary rule is a judicial fiction, created to prospectively protect Fourth Amendment rights by deterring futur
Why this matters
Statements obtained from an arrestee detained more than 48 hours without a judicial probable-cause determination must be suppressed unless the prosecution proves they were sufficiently attenuated from the Fourth Amendment violation.