Background
A jury convicted Michelle Lee Marr of second-degree murder and tampering with documents or proceedings. The district court sentenced her to three hundred months in prison for the murder and two hundred forty months for the tampering, to be served concurrently. Marr appealed, challenging the admission of her statements, the search of her phone, the admission of prior bad acts, the sufficiency of the evidence, and the reasonableness of her sentence.
The court’s reasoning
The court reviewed the custody inquiry under the totality of the circumstances, noting that the interviews occurred at Marr’s home, she was not restrained, and agents explicitly stated the interaction was voluntary. Regarding the phone search, the court found consent was voluntary given Marr’s age, her history of arrests, and the non-custodial setting. The court held that evidence of prior violent acts was admissible under Rule four zero four B to prove intent and malice aforethought, as the acts were similar in kind and recent. The evidence was sufficient to support the verdict on both charges, and the sentence was within the guidelines and not an abuse of discretion.
The most obvious and effective means of demonstrating that a suspect has not been taken into custody . . . is for the police to inform the suspect that an arrest is not being made and that the suspect may terminate the interview at will.
United States v. Roberts, 975 F.3d 709, 716 (2020)
What it means going forward
This decision reinforces that in-home interviews without explicit custody warnings are generally non-custodial, and that a defendant’s prior interactions with law enforcement support a finding of voluntary consent to search.
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