Floyd v. City of Crystal Springs11/24/1999
e defendant was asked to accompany the officers to the airport police office where the defendant consented to a search of his bags. This Court held that even if the initial stop of the defendant exceeded the scope of the investigative search and thus amounted to a seizure, the officers had probable cause to do so. McCray, 486 So. 2d at 1250.
. Floyd also cites to Haddox v. State, 636 So. 2d 1229 (Miss. 1994), another drug trafficking case which, again, cites Floyd for the requirement that to make an investigative stop, an officer needs only a reasonable suspicion that the suspect is involved in a felony. Haddox, 636 So. 2d at 1233. In Haddox, a law enforcement officer received information from a confidential informant that the defendants, two sisters, were to be driving into Marion County with a large amount of marijuana. The officer pulled over the vehicle driven by the sisters, and, upon not seeing any contraband in plain view, informed the sisters that they would have to wait while a search warrant was obtained. On appeal, the sisters argued that the detention amounted to an arrest and that the officer did not have probable cause to detain them. The Court held that the detention, which lasted only five to ten minutes, did not amount to an arrest, but was within the purview of the investigative stop, and that, at the time of the stop, there was no reasonable belief that the stop would turn into a more permanent detainment, i.e. a full arrest. Id. at 1237. As in both Floyd and McCray, this Court was not called upon in Haddox to make the felony/misdemeanor distinction, and the stop was unrelated to any traffic offense.
. Examining only the language of Floyd, McCray and Haddox containing the statement that to make an investigative stop, an officer needs only a reasonable suspicion that the suspect is involved in a felony, it would seem, at first blush, that Floyd's argument that Officer Palmer could not lawfully stop him for a traffic violation which did not occur in Officer Palmer's presence is correct. Nevertheless, this argument is misplaced.
. First, the language argued by Floyd from Floyd, McCray, and Haddox allows an officer to make an investigative stop where the traffic violation did not occur in his presence. Again, that language reads:
An investigative stop may be made even where officials have no probable cause to make an arrest as long as they have 'a reasonable suspicion, grounded on specific and articulable facts, that a person they encounter was involved or is wanted in connection with a completed felony . . . or some objective manifestation that the person stopped is, or is about to be engaged in criminal activity.'
Floyd, 500 So. 2d at 992 (quoting McCray, 486 So. 2d at 1249-50) (emphasis added). As Floyd points out, traffic violations are misdemeanors, and misdemeanors are, technically speaking, "criminal activity" in that misdemeanors, like felonies, are crimes. Therefore, the very language urged by Floyd allows an officer to stop a suspect so long has he has a reasonable suspicion of any "criminal activity."
. Second, Floyd takes the language relied upon out of context. The facts of neither Floyd, McCray, nor Haddox stand for the proposition for which Floyd cites those cases. The defendants in all three cases were suspected of felonies; thus, this Court was not faced with making a felony/misdemeanor distinction in any of cases cited by Floyd. The quoted language relied upon by Floyd is found either in cases like the three discussed above in which the investigative stop was made for purposes wholly unrelated to a traffic violation or in cases in which the suspect was stopped initially for a traffic violation, but where t
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