United States Court of Appeals 

For the Seventh Circuit

Chicago, Illinois 60604

Argued October 6, 2020

Decided November 3, 2020

Before

DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judge

MICHAEL B. BRENNAN, Circuit Judge

MICHAEL Y. SCUDDER, Circuit Judge

No. 19‐3364

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA,

Plaintiff‐Appellee,

v.

MICHAEL THOMPKINS,

Defendant‐Appellant.

Appeal from the United States

District Court for the Northern District

of Illinois, Eastern Division.

No. 1:18‐CR‐00664(1)

Virginia M. Kendall,

Judge.

O R D E R

About five minutes after a City of Chicago police officer pulled Michael

Thompkins over for a traffic violation, the officer asked him to step out of his vehicle.

After lengthy and at times heated discussions among Thompkins and a number of

Chicago police personnel, Thompkins left his van, and the officer saw that Thompkins

had been sitting on a gun. Later indicted for possessing a firearm as a felon in violation

of 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(1), Thompkins moved to suppress the gun, arguing that the order

to leave the vehicle was unjustified. After the district court held an evidentiary hearing

it denied Thompkins’s motion. He then pleaded guilty to the offense but preserved the

suppression issue for appeal. Because the order to leave the car was compatible with the

NONPRECEDENTIAL DISPOSITION

To be cited only in accordance with Fed. R. App. P. 32.1
No. 19‐3364    Page 2

Fourth Amendment, and the district court correctly resolved the motion to suppress, we

affirm.

I.

Officers Roger Farias and Sam Broderick were patrolling the Englewood

neighborhood of Chicago in April 2018. While driving down a one‐way street against

the flow of traffic, they passed Thompkins’s van, which had parked briefly, and they

saw an obstruction in the van’s front windshield. As Farias made a U‐turn, he observed

Thompkins pull out of his parked spot without signaling. Farias decided to pull

Thompkins over.   

The events of this traffic stop are depicted in dashboard and body‐camera

recordings and described in testimony at the suppression hearing. From the outset,

Farias testified, Thompkins concealed the lower half of his body, was “nervous,” and

sat “very close” to the steering wheel. Farias asked Thompkins for his license and

registration. Farias testified that, after Thompkins supplied this paperwork, he asked if

Thompkins had guns or drugs. Farias also stated that, after the paperwork exchange,

Thompkins lit a cigarette, but Farias’s bodycam video seems to show that the smoking

began before then. Farias then ran a database check on Thompkins (which took about

four minutes) and learned that Thompkins had convictions for unlawful use of a

weapon. When Farias asked Thompkins about his previous weapons convictions,

Thompkins described them as “old” to which Farias replied, “well, it’s last year.”

Officer Farias did not return Thompkins’s license and registration at that point; rather,

he held onto them while asking Thompkins about his record.

About five minutes after the stop began Broderick noticed a baton in the front of

Thompkins’s van. When asked about it, Thompkins denied its presence. Farias then told

Thompkins to “step out” of the car, stating, “I’m not going to give you tickets or

anything like that. I just, I want to make sure you don’t have any guns in the car, okay.”

Farias later testified that he had not actually decided to refrain from ticketing

Thompkins; he wanted to de‐escalate the situation and also needed to discuss ticketing

with his partner, as was his practice. Thompkins refused, arguing, “Ain’t nothing in

here, man. I mean, everything legit both ways in and out, so.” Thompkins told Farias he

would leave the car only if a superior officer showed up. About six minutes later a

superior officer showed up and after an involved discussion with Thompkins that

superior officer also ordered Thompkins out of his van. Other Chicago police personnel

joined in enforcing this order. When Thompkins left the van, Farias saw a gun that
No. 19‐3364    Page 3

Thompkins had been sitting on and recovered it. It was a loaded .40 caliber semi‐

automatic pistol, leading to his arrest.

After his indictment for possessing a firearm as a felon in violation of 18 U.S.C.

§ 922(g)(1), Thompkins moved to suppress the gun and any statements made after its

seizure. After an evidentiary hearing the district court denied the motion, crediting the

testimony of Farias and Broderick as “largely consistent” with the video evidence. The

court ruled that the officers had a lawful basis for the traffic stop; that the stop was not

unreasonably prolonged in light of the officers’ reasonable safety concerns; that those

concerns were evident at the outset; and that even if “the lawful purpose of the stop

ended at the moment Officer Farias informed Thompkins that he would not be issuing

any tickets,” Farias nonetheless had “independent reasonable suspicion to extend the

stop.” Finally, the district court added, “to the extent that the traffic stop was extended

at all, it was extended due to Thompkins[’s] own refusal to comply with the officer’s

direction to get out of the car until a supervisor appeared on the scene.” Later

Thompkins pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 27 months’ imprisonment and three

years of supervised release.   

II.

On an appeal of a denial of a suppression motion, we review the district courtʹs

legal conclusions de novo and its factual findings for clear error. United States v. Are,

590 F.3d 499, 504 (7th Cir. 2009). Thompkins does not challenge the initial stop, which

the district court ruled was justified by the failure to signal and an obstructed window.

Rather, Thompkins contends the officers prolonged the stop without the requisite

reasonable suspicion after they had finished its “traffic‐related” purpose, which ended

after the database check and Farias’s statement that he was not going to issue a ticket.

The government responds that, when Farias ordered Thompkins out of the car, he had

not decided whether to issue a ticket, so the order was a reasonable safety measure

during a brief traffic stop.   

With Thompkins’s concession that the initial stop was lawful, we assess the

reasonableness of the “incremental intrusion resulting from the request to get out of the

car.” Pennsylvania v. Mimms, 434 U.S. 106, 109 (1977). Mimms holds that, because traffic

stops expose officers to the risks of passing cars and unseen movements of the stopped

driver, the “de minimis” intrusion of ordering the driver out of the car is generally

justified. Id. at 109‐11. The order is justified even if, as in Mimms, the officer has “no

reason to suspect foul play from the particular driver at the time of the stop.” Id. at 109.
No. 19‐3364    Page 4

See also United States v. Johnson, 874 F.3d 571, 572–73 (7th Cir. 2017); United States v.

Tinnie, 629 F.3d 749, 751–52 (7th Cir. 2011). Likewise, officers may inquire into matters

not directly related to the reason for the traffic stop, such as asking whether there are

weapons in the vehicle. See Arizona v. Johnson, 555 U.S. 323, 333 (2009). But in Rodriguez

v. United States, the Supreme Court warned that “a traffic stop can become unlawful if

prolonged beyond the time reasonably required to complete th[e] mission of issuing a

warning ticket,” which typically involves a database check of the driver. 575 U.S. 348,

354–55 (2015) (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). If the stop is prolonged

in a “detour” from its traffic‐related mission, then the safety rationale for an order to

leave the car dissipates, unless the order is justified by an independent rationale

compatible with the Fourth Amendment. Id. at 356–57.   

We conclude the district court reasonably ruled that Farias did not impermissibly

extend the traffic stop when he ordered Thompkins out of the car. The court reasonably

credited Farias’s testimony that, despite his contrary statement to Thompkins, he had

not yet completed his traffic‐citation mission and was trying to de‐escalate rising

tensions. At that point, the investigation had lasted only about five minutes, Farias had

only seconds earlier finished the database check, he had not yet consulted his partner

about whether to issue a ticket, as was his practice, and he had not returned

Thompkins’s license and registration. Based on these factors, it was permissible to find

that the traffic‐related purpose was still legitimately ongoing. So this case falls within

the rule of Mimms, where officer safety justifies ordering a driver from a car during a

genuinely unconcluded investigation.

Thompkins contests the factual finding that, when Farias ordered him out of the

car, Farias had not finished the traffic‐citation mission of the stop. He does so by

attacking the credibility of other aspects of Farias’s testimony. Specifically, he argues

that the video recording near the start of the traffic stop does not show, as Farias

testified, that Thompkins was sitting “very close” to the steering wheel or that he

started smoking only after Farias asked for his license and registration. But these

arguments do not establish clear error; on the contrary, we commend Judge Kendall for

her careful review of the record. First, these aspects of Farias’s testimony are unrelated

to his testimony about the unfinished investigation. Second, the arguments are weak:

the video recording is not clear either way regarding Thompkins’s posture, and Farias

may have genuinely forgotten when Thompkins began smoking. Third, the twelve‐

minute delay between the order to leave the car and Thompkins’s exit, which he calls
No. 19‐3364    Page 5

the unrelated “detour,” occurred only because Thompkins refused to leave the car until

Farias’s superior arrived and then contested the supervisor’s order to leave the vehicle.

AFFIRMED