Speeding ticket ended trooper's mission, right to detain.

Byline: Bill Cresenzo

A highway patrolman "disregarded the basic tenets of the Fourth Amendment" when he unlawfully detained a man after issuing him a ticket for speeding, resulting in the man's arrest and subsequent conviction for trafficking cocaine, a narrowly divided North Carolina Supreme Court has ruled.

In 2014, the trooper, John Lamm, stopped Michael Reed on Interstate 95 near Benson for speeding. Reed, who had a New York driver's license, was driving a rental car and traveling with a female passenger and a pit bull. Lamm instructed Reed to get into the front seat of Lamm's patrol car and close the door. Reed was nervous about closing the door, but Lamm repeated the instruction and Reed complied.

After 15 minutes of questioning, Lamm issued Reed a warning ticket and told him that the traffic stop was concluded. Moments later, though, Lamm asked the passenger, who had signed the rental papers for the car, for permission to search the car. She signed a permission form, and Lamm searched the car and found cocaine. In 2015, Reed pleaded guilty to trafficking 200 to 400 grams of cocaine. He was sentenced to 70 to 93 months in prison and ordered to pay a $100,000 fine.

Reed appealed, arguing that Lamm's authority to detain him for speeding ended when Lamm told Reed that he was going to issue a warning citation for speeding and gave him a copy of the ticket. The Court of Appeals subsequently ruled, in a 2-1 decision, that Lamm lacked reasonable suspicion to search the rental car after the traffic stop had been completed. The state appealed, and on Feb. 20, in a 4-3 ruling authored by Justice Michael Morgan, the Supreme Court affirmed.

Lamm had accomplished his mission for stopping Reed after he questioned him and wrote him the ticket, Morgan wrote. After that, Reed and his passenger should have been on their way.

"The [officer] who arrested defendant disregarded the basic tenets of the Fourth Amendment by prolonging the traffic stop without defendant's voluntary consent or a reasonable, articulable suspicion of criminal activity to justify doing so," Morgan wrote

Lamm argued that he had reason to detain Reed because of, among things, his nervousness about shutting the patrol car's door while he was being questioned, which Lamm considered to be an indicator that Reed was about to flee the scene. But Morgan said that the Supreme Court has expressly determined that general nervousness is insignificant to reasonable suspicion analysis because...

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