United States v. Howard Eugene McCully Jr.

21 F.3d 712, 1994 U.S. App. LEXIS 6964, 1994 WL 117215

• Court: Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit
• Decided: April 11, 1994
• Docket: 93-1055
• Status: Published

Opinions

The court delivered a PER CURIAM opinion. Jones, Circuit Judge (pp. 712-14), delivered a separate concurring opinion.

PER CURIAM.

Defendant-Appellant Howard Eugene MeCully appeals the district court’s denial of his motion to suppress evidence. He claims that police officers stopped him under the pretext of a traffic violation when in fact they wanted to investigate illegal drug activity.

The parties briefed and argued this case before this circuit handed down its opinion in United States v. Ferguson, 8 F.3d 385 (6th Cir.1993) (fin banc). We have permitted the parties to update their filings in light of that decision, which established a new test for analyzing whether an alleged pretextual traffic stop and search violates the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures. The court held in Ferguson that “so long as the officer has probable cause to believe that a traffic violation has occurred or was occurring, the resulting stop is not unlawful and does not violate the Fourth Amendment.” Id. at 391.

In this case, an officer testified that he pulled MeCully over for stopping his vehicle in the middle of a road. The district court found, and MeCully admits, that he briefly stopped his car in the middle of the road. This action, the district court determined, violates the Grand Rapids, Michigan traffic code. MeCully does not challenge that the officer had probable cause to believe that the traffic violation was occurring. Therefore, under Ferguson, the stop of MeCully was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment, and the conviction is thereby AFFIRMED.