No Charges for Manningham After Traffic Stop

This news is from last Friday, but I' m just now getting around to posting about it.

Over the summer, there was a rumor about a traffic stop involving Michigan receiver Mario Manningham. The exact details were never really found out when the rumor was mentioned, but we got a rundown of what actually happened from an article in the Detroit News that was published last Friday. Basically, back in April, Manningham was in a car with Johnny Sears and a 17-year old not connected to the football program when police pulled the car over. I'll let the article explain the rest.

The three young men were in a four-door, blue 1990 Cadillac, registered to Manningham's father, southbound on U.S. 23, an artery that shoots straight south from Ann Arbor to his home state of Ohio. It is also, police say, a route traveled frequently by drug couriers.

In southern Monroe County, not far from the state line, an unmarked car pulled up behind the Cadillac. In it were at least two agents from OMNI, a coalition of city police, county sheriff's deputies and state police troopers aimed at interdicting drug trafficking. The agents, returning from an assignment in another county, just happened on the Cadillac.

Because the Cadillac had Mardi Gras beads dangling from the rearview mirror and may have been going 10 mph over the speed limit (the unmarked car wasn't equipped with radar), and one occupant wasn't wearing a seatbelt, the agents radioed ahead to the Monroe County Sheriff's Department to send a marked vehicle to make a stop.

For reasons that are unclear, the sheriff's deputy searched the three young men and the car. Sears and White had a small amount of marijuana secreted in their clothing, less than the amount found in one joint.

The deputy found a couple 500-milligram tablets of Vicodin, a prescription pain killer and a controlled substance, in Manningham's pockets and a couple more in his suitcase in the trunk.

So, if Manningham was found with Vicodin on him that wasn't his, why no charges?

"While Manningham may have used poor judgment in how he obtained the pills -- from a teammate, rather than asking his doctor to refill the prescription -- his actions certainly don't rise to the level of a criminal offense," Nichols said today. "I don't think the intent of the statute was to criminally charge people under circumstances like these."

Nichols studied the case carefully, consulting with other prosecutors, he said in an interview, because technically what Manningham did was a felony, and his teammate may have committed one as well.

One critical piece of evidence was a letter from a U-M team physician, who verified that Manningham had surgery on Jan. 8, had been prescribed 750-milligram Vicodin pills, and that had the doctor known he was out, he was have written another prescription.

Johnny Sears and the 17-year old both received a misdemeanor charge for having marijuana on them. I imagine this was a "strike" against Sears that made his room for error off the field much smaller when it came to dealing with Lloyd Carr. Rumors of why he left the team have varied, but it certainly makes a little more sense as to why he was suddenly gone so quickly. With a strike or two against him already, one slip-up could've had him packing his things.

Getting back to Mario Manningham, it is a good thing nothing came of these charges and the prosecutor decided to let him off since his intention wasn't that of a criminal. If this really was something that Mario had worried about, you can understand why he had a career game against Minnesota. Couple the fact that he could focus strictly on the game with the inexperienced Gopher secondary and it was a recipe for a great game.