Lentz v. Kennedy, No. 18-2659 (7th Cir. 2020)
Annotate this CaseFor nearly a week Lentz feigned ignorance as she pretended to help investigators locate her missing father. Officers soon discovered the father’s decaying body hidden at the office building the two shared. All signs pointed to Lentz as the murderer. Lentz, with her young daughter, voluntarily accompanied officers to the police station under the pretense of follow-up questioning for the investigation. For the first hour and a half, officers asked general questions, like when and where she last saw her father, to commit Lentz to her story. They then took a cigarette break. When the interview resumed, officers read Lentz her Miranda rights and confronted her with the mounting evidence against her. Over the next four hours, Lentz slowly confessed to shooting her father. In the state trial court, Lentz unsuccessfully moved to suppress her videotaped confession. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed her first-degree murder conviction; state post-conviction proceedings were unsuccessful. The Seventh Circuit affirmed the denial of federal habeas relief. The state court’s decisions that Lentz was not in custody during the pre-Miranda portion of the questioning and that her confession was not involuntary, despite officers’ comments about her daughter, were not an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law.
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