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06/21/2004 Archived Entry: "Justices Uphold a Nevada Law Requiring Citizens to Identify Themselves to the Police"

Posted by steve @ 11:37 PM EST [Link]

HIIBEL RULING UPHELD: Hard to believe I missed this earlier today. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that people are required to identify themselves to a police officer when asked under circumstances.

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.

Read on. Read SCOTUS' ruling here (PDF format)

ESR has also weighed in with essays that you can find here and here.