I can move this if people have strong feelings about the issue.
Quote:
Justices Uphold a Nevada Law Requiring Citizens to Identify Themselves to the Police
Quote:
By Linda Greenhouse
WASHINGTON, June 21 - People who have given the police some reason to suspect that they may be involved in a crime can be required to identify themselves unless their very name would be incriminating, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in a case that had raised concerns about the boundaries of personal privacy.
The 5-to-4 decision addressed a question that, surprisingly, had gone unresolved for decades. But the answer the court gave was hardly definitive, leaving for another day some of the more difficult issues of application.
The case was a challenge by a Nevada rancher to a state law requiring people stopped in suspicious circumstances to identify themselves on the request of a police officer. Twenty states, including New York, have such laws on their books, as do a number of cities and towns.
The rancher, Larry D. Hiibel argued that his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure and his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination were violated by the state law. Mr. Hiibel's cause was taken up by an array of groups concerned with privacy in an age when a name entered in an electronic database can provide a sometimes startling amount of personal information.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's majority opinion rejected both constitutional arguments, at least as they applied to Mr. Hiibel. As a Fourth Amendment matter, Justice Kennedy said, the demand to identify oneself is a logical corollary to the circumstances of a valid police stop, as described by the court in a 1968 decision, Terry v. Ohio.
That decision permits a police officer to briefly detain, question and conduct a pat-down search of a person whose behavior has given rise to "reasonable suspicion," short of the probable cause necessary for a formal arrest. Such an encounter is widely known as a "Terry stop."
"Obtaining a suspect's name in the course of a Terry stop serves important government interests," Justice Kennedy said. "The request for identity has an immediate relation to the purpose, rationale and practical demands of a Terry stop," he added.
But as Justice Kennedy pointed out, in the 36 years since the Terry decision, the court, while permitting a police officer to question a suspect, had never explicitly decided whether the suspect had to answer or could be arrested and prosecuted for refusing. He acknowledged that a number of opinions, including a concurring opinion by Justice Byron R. White in the Terry case itself, had indicated that there was not an obligation to respond. But "we do not read these statements as controlling," Justice Kennedy said, as long as the request for identification is made in the context of a valid Terry stop.
In this case, Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, No. 03-5554, the request by a deputy sheriff for Mr. Hiibel's name was valid, Justice Kennedy concluded. The deputy had responded to a telephone report of a man hitting a woman in the cab of a truck parked along a rural road. Arriving to investigate a possible domestic assault, the deputy found a man who turned out to be Mr. Hiibel standing outside the truck, with a young woman sitting inside the cab. She turned out to be his daughter.
Eleven times, the deputy asked Mr. Hiibel for identification, and 11 times, he refused to provide it. The incident was caught by a video camera on the deputy's car, and can be seen on Mr. Hiibel's Web site, www.hiibel.com, along with Mr. Hiibel's description of the events and the following description of him: "He lives a simple life, but he's his own man."
Eventually, Mr. Hiibel was arrested and charged with the misdemeanor of refusing to identify himself. He was convicted and fined $250. The Nevada Supreme Court upheld his conviction.
In the ruling on Monday, the majority's analysis of Mr. Hiibel's Fifth Amendment challenge to the law was more ambiguous than the Fourth Amendment discussion. Mr. Hiibel argued that his conviction violated his Fifth Amendment right against compelled self-incrimination. But "in this case disclosure of his name presented no reasonable danger of incrimination," Justice Kennedy said, and so the case did not test the Fifth Amendment limits of a compelled-identification law.
06-25-2004, 12:06
It's Official...Gotta Tell Who You Are! 
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