## Facts

- A San Francisco bank was robbed on October 9, 1986, and surveillance photographs captured the robber.
- On October 10, 1986, an FBI agent identified Jerri C. Lewis as the person in the photographs based on prior contact in an earlier bank robbery prosecution.
- Lewis was arrested on October 20, 1986.
- On October 21, 1986, two FBI agents interviewed Lewis in the prison ward of a hospital shortly after she returned from surgery to remove an abscess caused by heroin injections; the surgery involved general anesthesia.
- Lewis was a heroin addict and was experiencing withdrawal symptoms at the time of the interview.
- According to the agents’ account credited by the district court for purposes of the motion, Lewis received Miranda warnings, stated she understood them, did not request counsel, did not ask that questioning stop, appeared coherent and responsive, and was not threatened or promised anything.
- Lewis confessed during the hospital interview.
- The district court granted a motion to suppress, concluding the confession was not knowing and voluntary based largely on the judge’s personal experience about post-anesthesia effects, despite resolving disputed facts in the government’s favor.
- The government appealed the suppression order under 18 U.S.C. § 3731.

## Issues

1. Whether Lewis’s confession was involuntary under the Due Process Clause, given her heroin addiction, withdrawal, and recent general anesthesia, where the credited facts showed no threats, promises, or other improper police conduct.
2. Whether the district court erred by relying on the judge’s personal, extra-record experience with general anesthesia to find the confession involuntary rather than basing that finding on record evidence.
3. How an appellate court should review a voluntariness ruling when the district court accepts one side’s factual account but reaches a legal conclusion inconsistent with those accepted facts.

## Decision

- The Ninth Circuit reversed the order suppressing Lewis’s confession and remanded.
- Accepting the factual account the district court said it relied upon (the agents’ declarations), the court held the confession was voluntary under the totality of the circumstances.
- The court held the district court erred by using the judge’s personal experience with anesthesia as a substitute for evidentiary support for a medical inference about incapacity.

## Legal Principles

- Voluntariness is assessed under the totality of the circumstances, with the central inquiry whether the defendant’s will was overborne.
- Coercive police activity is generally a necessary predicate to a finding that a confession is involuntary under due process.
- Drug addiction, withdrawal, intoxication, or medical conditions are relevant but not categorically dispositive; the question is whether the suspect had sufficient capacity to understand rights and respond, and whether police conduct was coercive.
- A court may not substitute a judge’s extra-record personal experience for evidence when making factual findings about medical or physiological effects; such conclusions must rest on the record (and, where appropriate, competent medical proof).

## Conclusion

The Ninth Circuit held that a hospital-bed confession obtained after Miranda warnings from a heroin-addicted suspect experiencing withdrawal and recently under general anesthesia was voluntary where the credited record showed she was coherent and there was no coercive police conduct, and it rejected the suppression ruling because it rested on the judge’s unsupported personal assumptions rather than evidence.


United States v. Lewis, 833 F.2d 1380 (9th Cir. 1987)