Client Found Not Guilty of Firearms-Related Felonies
Berrien County Jury Finds Benton Harbor Man Not Guilty of Six Firearms-Related Felonies
St. Joseph, Mich. – August 8, 2022 – Following a two-day trial, Yusef Lateef Phillips, of Benton Harbor, was acquitted of felony firearm charges by a Berrien County jury on Friday, August 5. The jury took approximately 45 minutes to return a “not guilty” verdict on each of the six counts stemming from an August 2020 traffic stop.
Michigan State Police troopers seized two pistols from a rental car in which Phillips was a passenger. Prosecutors charged Phillips with three separate felonies for each seized firearm, for a total of six felony charges.
Phillips’ attorney Heath Lynch of Springstead Bartish Borgula & Lynch, PLLC, challenged the grounds for the traffic stop claiming Michigan State Police officers unlawfully stopped the vehicle and impermissibly prolonged what should have been a routine traffic stop simply so they could search the vehicle, which was traveling in a high-crime area in Benton Harbor. The trial court denied Phillips’ motion, and the Court of Appeals affirmed that decision on appeal.
Prior to trial, Phillips denied knowing about either of the firearms seized from the rental car and declined to accept the prosecuting attorney’s plea offer. The trial began on Thursday, August 4, with the arresting troopers testifying for the prosecution. The jury viewed a video of the traffic stop, as captured by the troopers’ dashboard camera. The driver of the vehicle, who was not the renter or an authorized driver, testified that he and Phillips briefly borrowed the vehicle from the renter and were unaware of the two firearms that had been concealed in the passenger compartment.
Lynch said, “There were two real problems with this case. The first was the credibility of the officers, whose accounts of the traffic stop changed dramatically during the course of the case. An officer can stop a moving vehicle for any number of reasons, but the reasons at least need to remain consistent over time. For an officer first to claim the stop was for a failure to use a turn signal and to stop at a stop sign (both violations were disproven by the video footage) and then change and change again, his account of events was just too much, and I think the jurors began to doubt the rest of the officer’s testimony because of it. The other problem was that officers failed to even look for any corroborating evidence, such as fingerprints or DNA on the firearms. They just expected the jury to convict based on proximity alone, and the jury clearly was unwilling to do so.”
Phillips faced prison time if convicted. Carrying a concealed weapon is a felony punishable by up to five years in prison. “Felony firearm,” or possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, carries a mandatory two-year prison sentence, which must run consecutively to any other sentence imposed in the case.
