Anderson v. State

In Anderson v. State, 91 P.3d 984, 988 (Alaska App. 2004) the defendant was arrested on misdemeanor charges with a set bail amount. Under these circumstances, the officers were required to give him a reasonable opportunity to post bail before subjecting him to a pre-incarceration inventory search. When Anderson arrived at the correctional center, an officer immediately emptied his pockets to search for contraband, discovering methamphetamine. This was an illegal search. However, Anderson did not post bail within an hour, at which point he would have been subject to a valid full inventory search. The trial court therefore found that the exclusionary rule did not apply to the methamphetamine, because it would have been inevitably discovered during the later valid inventory search, and this Court affirmed that decision.