Inevitable Discovery Saves Car Search

US v. Alston: Alston ran a red light and an officer tried to pull him over. Alston didn’t do so until he ran into a parked car. While he drove, the officer saw Alston reach under the seat and suspected he might be fiddling with a gun. When the officer pulled up next to Alston said he had been distracted and he was reaching under the seat because he dropped his cell phone. When asked if there was anything in the car “he shouldn’t have,” Alston produced a bag of marijuana, which he tossed into the officer’s car. The officer and Alston then had a long dialogue about what else might be in the car while waiting for Alston’s mother to come and take the car, during which Alston repeatedly said he wasn’t going to arrest Alston. He just wanted “the heater” he was convinced Alston had been hiding. After Alston got out of the car, the officer searched it and found a gun. Alston was eventually arrested by a local task force for, among other things, being a felon in possession of a firearm. The district court ordered much of Alston’s statements and other evidence suppressed, but not the gun, concluding that it would have inevitably been seized because the marijuana provided probable cause to search the car.

The Fourth Circuit affirmed the district court’s decision. The court agreed that the bag of marijuana gave the officer probable cause to search the car, but noted that the district court never expressly held that the officer would have conducted that search. The court concluded that he would have because he believed Alston had a gun and his focus during the stop was in recovering it, testifying that “getting the heater off the street [was] more pressing than taking [Alston] to jail.”