Colorado Supreme Court People v. Guthrie 12SA80

Decision here.

   Guthrie was charged with DUI, and pled guilty as part of a plea agreement.  While she was getting set up at the probation office, the PO noticed that she was drunk.  She was escorted into the courtroom where she was held in contempt of court.  Apparently, there was some violation in the way the contempt charge was handled by the judge.  That become important later.

   A deputy took Guthrie into custody, and during the booking process her property was inventoried.  She was found to be in possession of Oxycodone for which she lacked a prescription, and she was charged with possession of a controlled substance.  The trial court for that charge recognized that the deputy didn't do anything wrong, but suppressed the drugs found during the inventory because it didn't agree with the contempt of court charge.  The people filed an interlocutory appeal.

   The Colorado Supreme Court didn't address the question of whether or not it was proper to hold Guthrie in contempt of court.  The fact is that she WAS held in contempt, and the deputy was acting properly when he arrested her.  The court observed that inventory searches at the jail don't really involve the warrant requirement or probable cause, they are valid because the government interests in conducting the inventory (including  protecting an arrestee's property while it remains in police custody, preventing claims of lost or stolen property against the police, and protecting the arrestee and others from the risk that a dangerous instrumentality or substance might be concealed in an innocent looking article) outweigh the prisoner's expectation of privacy while confined at a jail.  The court also noted that the exclusionary rule is not a Constitutional right; it's a procedure the courts follow when using it would deter unlawful searches by the police.  Since the police did nothing wrong here, and since the search was justified as a routine administrative property inventory, the suppression of the drugs was reversed and the case was sent back to the district court for further proceedings.