People v. Leanos

236 N.E.3d 559

2023 IL App (1st) 191079

The PEOPLE of the State of Illinois, Plaintiff-Appellee,

v.Danial LEANOS, Defendant-Appellant.

No. 1-19-1079

Appellate Court of Illinois, First District, SECOND DIVISION.

Filed June 13, 2023

Appeal from the Circuit Court of Cook County. No. 12 CR 04242, Honorable Geary W. Kull, Judge Presiding.

James E. Chadd, Douglas R. Hoff, and Richard Connor Morley, of State Appellate Defender’s Office, of Chicago, for appellant.

Kimberly M. Foxx, State’s Attorney, of Chicago (Enrique Abraham, Tasha-Marie Kelly, and Koula A. Fournier, Assistant State’s Attorneys, of counsel), for the People.

OPINION

JUSTICE ELLIS delivered the judgment of the court, with opinion.

¶ 1 Defendant, Danial Leanos, was 18 years old when he confessed to shooting and killing Henry Martinez, a member of a rival gang. Defendant’s youthful age figures prominently in both of his appellate issues. First, he argues that his Miranda waiver (see Miranda v. Arizona, 384 U.S. 436, 86 S.Ct. 1602, 16 L.Ed.2d 694 (1966)) was rendered invalid by various interrogation tactics that were duplicitous in their own right and all the more so in light of his youth and immaturity. Second, he argues that the trial court short-circuited counsel’s attempt to raise a youth-based, as-applied sentencing challenge under the proportionate penalties clause of the Illinois Constitution (Ill. Const. 1970, art. I, § 11), based on an erroneous belief that such challenges are not available to a defendant who has passed his eighteenth birthday.

¶ 2 We find that defendant’s Miranda waiver was valid and that counsel never actually tided to raise an as-applied challenge under the state constitution. (But defendant remains free to raise such a challenge in a postconviction petition.) We thus affirm his conviction and sentence.

¶ 3 That said, we do find some of the detectives’ interrogation tactics troubling and worthy of sustained scrutiny, especially since they raise issues of first impression for the Illinois reviewing courts. First among them was a pair of assurances to defendant that "What you tell us is stayin’ in here," and "What you say here, stays here with us right now."

¶ 4 However these assurances were intended, they could have been reasonably understood as promises of confidentiality—blanket assurances that defendant’s statements would be held in confidence by the police and not used against him in a criminal proceeding. Promises of confidentiality squarely contradict the Miranda warnings.

¶ 5 Suppression is not warranted here, however, because—and only because—we are convinced that, when all was said and done, these assurances were far attenuated from defendant’s confession and not remotely responsible for it.

¶ 6 BACKGROUND

¶ 7 Henry Martinez, a member of the Two-Six gang, was shot and killed on the night of February 1, 2012. Martinez was in the living room of his second-floor Cicero apartment when a gunshot was fired from outside, came in through his window, and struck him in the back. Based on their initial investigation, the police quickly suspected that the shooting was carried out by a member of a rival gang, namely, the Maniac Latin Disciples (MLDs).

¶ 8 The Cicero Police Department began targeting MLDs in the area. One can only imagine that defendant, whose bike was found abandoned at the murder scene, was first, or close to it, on their list. And as it happened, a tactical officer arrested him about two hours after the shooting and some three blocks away. Officially, his offense was underage drinking. Defendant, we are told, was seen with a beer on the sidewalk.

¶ 9 Around 1:30 in the morning, Detectives Leuzzi and Struska, who were investigating the murder, learned that defendant was in custody. Leuzzi knew defendant, and his mother and brother, from various prior interactions. Leuzzi would later insist, at the suppression hearing, that defendant entered the picture solely as a prospective witness and not as suspect. Be that as it may, with defendant under arrest for drinking a beer, the detectives could now confront him about the murder in the context of a custodial (indeed, station house) interrogation. But for now, it was late, and defendant may have been drunk, so best to let him sleep it off in the lockup. The interrogation could wait until the following afternoon.

¶ 10 We will return to the details of the interrogation later, as they become relevant to our analysis. For now, a brief overview will provide context for defendant’s claims. Leuzzi and Struska first spoke to defendant around 1 p.m. on the day after the murder, about 12 hours after he was arrested. Early on, the detectives read defendant his rights, and he initialed next to each warning on a preprinted form to indicate that he understood them. They did not explicitly ask whether he wanted a lawyer or wished to speak to the police at that time.

¶ 11 The detectives, remaining circumspect for the time being, told defendant that "something happened" the night before and they were "just trying to figure it out." They discussed the reason for defendant’s arrest—as the story goes, an officer saw him with a beer in his hand on the street. Defendant denied that he had been drinking the night before. But he did confirm that he was an MLD from Martinez’s neighborhood.

¶ 12 This first round of interrogation was brief, lasting about 15 minutes. All told, there would be four successive rounds, separated by short breaks. About 3½ hours after the start of the interrogation, defendant confessed that he shot Martinez. (There were some more rounds after that, but they are not relevant for our purposes here.)

¶ 13 During the second and third rounds of interrogation, defendant told a series of different stories, each of which the detectives quickly debunked. At first, he said he was with his mother and sister at the pertinent times. But the detectives had already spoken to his family, and even they had contradicted his claims. Defendant then said he was with a female acquaintance named Nellie and thus continued to maintain that he had no knowledge of the murder. But his timeline did not match the statements of various other witnesses who put him at the scene.

¶ 14 It was shortly after defendant claimed he was with Nellie, during the second round of interrogation, that the detectives made the alleged promises of confidentiality. As they said to him, "What you tell us is stayin’ in here," and "What you say here, stays here with us right now." They also said, a number of times, that they thought defendant was lying to protect another member of his gang.

¶ 15 By the third round of interrogation, the detectives were forcefully insisting that defendant was present for, and had knowledge of, the murder—though they still believed, or at least they continued to tell defendant, that they did not think he was the shooter. Defendant switched gears and said he was down the street on the next block when Martinez was shot. And he named one Derrick Jones as the shooter. The detectives impressed on defendant that this was his last chance to tell the truth before the case was presented to the state’s attorney and defendant got "locked into" his statements. Defendant stuck to this story and continued to point the finger at Jones.

¶ 16 During the next break in the interrogation, the detectives ascertained that Jones was in custody, in Cook County Jail when Martinez was shot. During the fourth (and for our purposes final) round of interrogation, the detectives squarely confronted defendant with their suspicion that he was the shooter. And that is when he finally admitted that he was.

¶ 17 During the custodial interview, defendant was shown a photo of a chrome bicycle that the police found in a nearby gangway during the initial sweep of the scene. He identified the bike as his and said that he left it in the street after the shooting. He also accompanied the detectives on a videotaped walk-though of the scene. He showed them where he was standing when he fired the shot that hit Martinez (and a few others that hit the side of the building). Four spent casings had been recovered from that area during the initial sweep. And he showed the detectives where he tossed the gun in the gangway. The gun was never recovered.

¶ 18 Defendant moved to suppress his confession on both Miranda and voluntariness grounds. The motion was denied after a hearing, at which Leuzzi was the sole witness, and the confession was admitted at defendant's bench trial as the State’s key piece of evidence. In fact, it was nearly the whole of the State’s case, which consisted of the confession and one piece of forensic evidence: gunshot residue on the jacket and flannel that defendant was wearing when he was taken into custody on the night of the shooting.

¶ 19 Defendant took the stand and recanted his confession. He testified, in sum, that he spent the night drinking and smoking pot with various people. Eventually, he made his way to Arturo’s house, a friend and fellow MLD who lived down the block from Martinez. He was hoping to catch a ride home from Arturo since he was in no shape to ride his bike. While defendant was in Arturo’s gangway, he heard some other MLDs arguing with some Two-Six gang members.

¶ 20 Defendant crossed the street and encountered "Porky" and Rolando (also referred to as Ronaldo at various points in the record) arguing with two people inside a building. Defendant shook hands with them. As he stood there, about an arm’s length away, Rolando started shooting. Defendant ran to his grandmother’s house. Nobody answered the door, so he hid in the gangway where he was later arrested. He denied that the bike found near the scene was his.

¶ 21 Defendant testified that he falsely confessed to shooting Martinez because he was afraid of gang retaliation if he pointed the finger at anyone else: "snitches get stiches," as he repeatedly said. So he took the fall for Martinez’s murder to avoid being killed himself. On top of...