Facts
Sana Bounaim was working as a cashier at a Chevron near Highway 45 in Columbus. One night in May 2022, Bounaim was alone in the store, working the nightshift. Around 9:30, shortly before she would have closed, a man “came from the door and told [her], ‘This is a gun. . . . [G]ive me the money or your life.’” Bounaim testified that the man’s face was covered by a shirt and a mask and that his hand, in which she believed he had a gun, was covered by a shirt. She removed all the money in the register, roughly $2,000, and placed it in a black plastic bag before giving it to the man. She testified that the man ran from the store and crossed Highway 45, and she identified the direction on a map used by the State as an exhibit. Bounaim called 911 and gave a description of the robber.
Bounaim testified at trial that she recognized the man as a customer who came in two or three times each day, but she did not realize this until he had left with the money. She identified the man, Ronnie Lewis Mixon, at trial. Video footage from the Chevron was played for the jury. Bounaim identified Mixon in the video, which showed Mixon standing outside the Chevron minutes before the robbery. At that time, Mixon was wearing a light-colored shirt, possibly gray, and black pants. Mixon left the frame of the video and then returned to view, now shirtless and wearing the gray shirt on the top of his head. A dark-colored piece of fabric concealed his right hand. Less than a minute later, Mixon exited the building carrying a black bag.
Video footage from inside the store showed Mixon enter with his face concealed by a black surgical mask and a gray shirt. When he approached the counter, he raised his right hand at Bounaim as she moved behind the counter. His hand was concealed by a dark-colored fabric, but he kept his arm raised and pointed at Bounaim throughout the robbery. After Bounaim’s 911 call, officers responded to the area. Officer Melvin Shirley was told to look for a Black male wearing dark clothing in an area near the Chevron behind a Harbor Freight store. Officer Shirley joined other officers at the area, and his body camera video was played for the jury. Another officer, Officer Tate, yelled for someone to stop, and Officer Shirley saw a man running away from the officers toward a wooded area. The officers caught up with the man, Mixon, and handcuffed him in the woods. Officer Shirley testified they found no weapons or money on Mixon, and he was wearing shorts and a dark blue shirt at arrest.
After Mixon was handcuffed and secured, officers searched the woods and area where Officer Tate first spotted Mixon. Officer Shirley found black cargo pants and a large amount of cash on the ground. At trial, he identified the pants Mixon wore in the Chevron video as similar to the pants he found near Harbor Freight. Officer Shirley also testified that Mixon’s black shoes were similar to those worn during the robbery. As officers stood near their vehicles and Officer Tate counted the money, Officer Shirley asked Mixon where the gun was. Mixon told him that he did not have one and that he had used a green bottle, not a gun. Officers stopped looking for a weapon. Later that evening, another officer searched the area where Mixon had been arrested and found a gray shirt similar to the one seen in the Chevron video and a green Sprite bottle.
After arrest, Mixon was taken to the Columbus Police Department and placed in an interrogation room. A recording from the interrogation room was played for the jury. While Mixon was alone in the room, he talked to himself. He stated that he did not have a gun and that his face had been covered up: “I didn’t have no gun. . . . The woman can’t I.D. me because my face got covered up . . . . They can’t prove that was me on that damn video . . .my face covered up.” The jury convicted Mixon as charged, and the trial court sentenced him to twenty-five years in the Mississippi Department of Corrections, with twenty years to serve followed by five years of post-release supervision.
On appeal, the defendant argued his statement should have been suppressed. MCOA agreed with defendant but affirmed conviction using harmless error.
Analysis
Mixon argues that the trial court erred by allowing the State to admit evidence of a statement he made while in custody, before he was informed of his Miranda rights.
At a hearing on Mixon’s motion to suppress, Officer Timothy Tate testified that he responded to the armed robbery call and searched the area behind Harbor Freight. As he searched, he saw a Black man stand up from behind some pallets and run to the woods. A chase ensued, but officers eventually caught up to Mixon and were able to arrest him. (During the arrest, while Mixon was on the ground, Officer Shirley told Mixon “You have the right to remain silent, and I suggest you use it.” Neither party claims that this was a sufficient recitation of Mixon’s Miranda rights.) Officer Tate testified that while Mixon was on the ground, there were multiple officers around him, pointing guns and tasers. Officer Tate testified that they walked Mixon out of the woods to the parking lot and that the officers “start[ed] conducting a search for the bag that might have had contents from the store.” Tate returned to the area where he had first seen Mixon, and some officers found money there.
Footage of Officer Tate’s body camera was played. As Officer Tate counted the money at the hood of the car, Mixon stood nearby, in handcuffs, next to Officer Shirley. After more than ten minutes, Officer Shirley asked Mixon where the gun was, and Mixon responded that there was no gun, claiming that he had used a green bottle wrapped inside a t-shirt. Officer Shirley testified at the hearing and confirmed Officer Tate’s testimony. Both officers testified that they had not advised Mixon of his Miranda rights before asking him about the gun.
After testimony, the trial court asked the parties to provide caselaw on the public safety exception. The next day, after reviewing the research provided, the trial court denied Mixon’s motion to suppress based on the public safety exception. The trial court noted that it had been nighttime and dark, that they were “in an area close to businesses,” and that the public had access to the area, so the police had “some justifiable concern” about a gun being left behind and found by someone.
Mixon and the Statevagree that Mixon was subjected to custodial interrogation when officers asked him about thevgun used in the robbery.vHowever, there are exceptions to the custodial interrogation inquiry, including thevexception applied by the trial court here, the public safety exception, which was established by the United States Supreme Court in New York v. Quarles, 467 U.S. 649 (1984).vIn Quarles, SCOTUS held that in some situations, “the need for answers to questions in a situation posing a threat to the public safety outweighs the need for the prophylactic rule protecting the Fifth Amendment’s privilege against self incrimination.” SCOTUS held that this exception should be applied on a case-by-case basis, emphasizing that the ruling was based on the specific facts of Quarles’s arrest in that case.
In Quarles, officers pursued a rape suspect into a supermarket around 12:30 a.m. Inside, officers spotted a man matching the victim’s description, and a chase ensued. During the chase, officers momentarily lost sight of the man. Officers finally apprehended the suspect, and during an officer-safety frisk, officers realized that the man was wearing an empty gun holster. After handcuffing the man, officers asked where the gun was, and he told them he had thrown it into some empty cartons nearby. In applying the public safety exception, SCOTUS noted that the police in this case, in the very act of apprehending a suspect, were confronted with the immediate necessity of ascertaining the whereabouts of a gun which they had every reason to believe the suspect had just removed from his empty holster and discarded in the supermarket.” “So long as the gun was concealed somewhere in the supermarket, with its actual whereabouts unknown, it obviously posed more than one danger to the public safety: an accomplice might make use of it, a customer or employee might later come upon it.”
Application of this exception in our state has been limited, though it was most recently applied in Godbolt. In Godbolt, officers arrested Godbolt following a several-hour killing spree at multiple locations throughout Lincoln County, in which eight people were ultimately killed. Upon arrest, officers asked Godbolt “where the scene was located and if he had been shot.” MSC affirmed the trial court’s denial of Godbolt’s motion to suppress his response, noting that the officers testified at the hearing that they asked Godbolt to determine where potential victims might be, to see if Godbolt needed medical attention, or to determine if there were other active shooters.
Mixon argues that there was no threat to public safety when he was asked about the gun, noting that there were no exigencies at Mixon’s arrest and the fact that officers did not question Mixon about the gun until Mixon was isolated and detained, and the money—their primary objective—had been discovered. The State argues that Godbolt affirms “that officers may ask unwarned questions necessary to secure safety in situations involving weapons” and that the officers’ question about the gun was based on “an objectively reasonable need to locate the gun.”
The State’s argument urges us to push the public safety exception—an exception the Supreme Court emphasized was narrow—to the point where the exception swallows the rule. If we accepted the State’s argument, in any case involving a weapon, violence, or a secondary suspect, law enforcement would have authority to question a suspect about the weapon, whom he might have hurt, or if other accomplices lie in wait. We decline to do so.
Here, officers detained Mixon for more than ten minutes before asking him about the gun. Mixon was handcuffed and surrounded by officers and did not pose a threat to officer safety. Nor was this a situation like the supermarket in Quarles, which was open for business at the time and a shopper could have found the gun amongst the groceries. Mixon was detained in a grassy, wooded area behind two businesses, and there was no evidence that the area was one frequented by the public.
There is an argument that the officers were in pursuit of the alleged gun “the entire time.” But the video also shows that the officers’ primary objective was recovering the money; when an officer discovered the money, he yelled to the other officers, “I got it!” suggesting this is what they were primarily searching for. While officers may have been searching for the gun as well, the video suggests that the officers’ primary concerns were apprehending Mixon, then finding the money, then locating the gun. While a gun is undoubtedly a dangerous weapon, the mere fact that a dangerous weapon was used in a crime and later is unaccounted for is not grounds to ignore the suspect’s constitutional rights. We also emphasize that unlike the supermarket in Quarles, there was no evidence before the court that the uninhabited, wooded area behind Harbor Freight was an area often frequented by the public.
Additionally, our holding does not “impose a new time constraint on officers” seeking to apply the public safety exception. Our emphasis that the officers waited more than ten minutes to ask about the gun is to illustrate the lack of urgency or exigency surrounding the questions—and yes, to illustrate that officers had ample time to give Mixon his Miranda warnings. While the passage of time is not the sole consideration, it is part of the totality of the circumstances surrounding Mixon’s arrest and the officers’ questioning and is therefore a pertinent factor in this case.
The narrow exception outlined in Quarles does not apply here, and the trial court erred by failing to suppress Mixon’s statement. However, that does not end our inquiry, as the erroneous admission of statements should be subjected to a harmless-error analysis.
Here, the trial court’s error was ultimately harmless, as the evidence against Mixon was overwhelming. Bounaim testified that she recognized the man who robbed her and identified Mixon as the perpetrator multiple times at trial. A video of surveillance footage from the gas station showed a man Bounaim identified as Mixon to be waiting outside the building, dressed in clothes similar to those the robber wore in footage of the robbery. Video from officers’ body cameras showed Mixon wearing clothing similar to that seen in the gas station footage, and officers found money and pants worn by the robber near the area where Mixon was apprehended. Finally, in a video taken from the police interrogation room, the admission of which Mixon did not challenge on appeal, Mixon says aloud, “I didn’t have no gun,” and Bounaim “can’t I.D. me because my face got covered up . . . . They can’t prove that was me on that damn video . . . my face covered up.”
In light of this overwhelming evidence, the trial court’s error in admitting Mixon’s unwarned statement was harmless.