The court of appeals reversed a district court judgment. The court held that nearly thirteen hours of relentless overnight questioning of a sleep-deprived teenager by a tag team of officers rendered the teenager’s murder confession involuntary. The court held further that an officer’s unnecessarily lengthy and complicated Miranda advisement was ineffective where the officer erroneously warned about the teenager’s right to counsel and used qualifying language to downplay the warnings’ significance.
Police approached seventeen-year-old high school student Jonathan Doody during a high school football game. Doody voluntarily went with the police officers to the police station for questioning. Police investigators had been steered to Doody by the owner of a rifle that had been used to commit several murders in Arizona.
