Cite as: 511 U. S. 350 (1994)
Opinion of the Court
In this case, respondent was under arrest on state narcotics charges at the time he made his inculpatory statement to the Secret Service agents. The terms of § 3501(c) thus did not come into play until respondent was arrested by the agents on a federal charge—after he made the statement. Because respondent's statement was made voluntarily, as the District Court found, see App. to Pet. for Cert. 45a, nothing in § 3501 authorized its suppression. See 18 U. S. C. §§ 3501(a), (d). The State's failure to arraign or prosecute respondent does not alter this conclusion. Although Congress could have provided that the exercise of prosecutorial discretion by the State in this scenario retroactively transforms time spent in the custody of state or local officers into time spent under "arrest or other detention" for purposes of § 3501(c), it did not do so in the statute as written. Cf. Ger-main, 503 U. S., at 253-254.
Although we think proper application of § 3501(c) will be as straightforward in most cases as it is here, the parties identify one presumably rare scenario that might present some potential for confusion; namely, the situation that would arise if state or local authorities, acting in collusion with federal officers, were to arrest and detain someone in order to allow the federal agents to interrogate him in violation of his right to a prompt federal presentment. Long before the enactment of § 3501, we held that a confession obtained during such a period of detention must be suppressed if the defendant could demonstrate the existence of improper collaboration between federal and state or local officers. See Anderson v. United States, 318 U. S. 350 (1943).4 In this
4 In Anderson, a local sheriff, acting without authority under state law, arrested several men suspected of dynamiting federally owned power lines during the course of a labor dispute and allowed them to be interrogated for several days by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Only after the suspects made confessions were they arrested by the federal agents and arraigned before a United States Commissioner. We held the confessions to be inadmissible as the "improperly" secured product of an impermissible "working arrangement" between state and federal officers. 318 U. S., at 356.
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