State v. Topanotes

In State v. Topanotes, 2003 UT 30, 76 P.3d 1159, officers retained the defendant's identification during a consensual stop, elevating the stop to one requiring reasonable suspicion. A subsequent warrants check revealed two outstanding arrest warrants. In the search incident to arrest, officers found heroin on the defendant. Relying on the defendant's cooperative nature throughout the stop, the State argued that the heroin would have been inevitably discovered had the defendant not been unlawfully detained. The Court rejected this argument, reasoning that just because the defendant was cooperative while her identification was seized, that did not mean that she would have been cooperative if she had been truly free to leave.