Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court
Supreme Court upholds Nevada “stop and identify” statute
In Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court, the Supreme Court, in a split 5:4 decision, held that police officers could require individuals to identify themselves during an otherwise valid police stop, when the officer has reasonable suspicion that the individual is involved in a crime. Justice Kennedy, writing for the majority, rejected the argument that requiring identification violated the individual’s Fourth or Fifth Amendment rights. Justices Stevens and Breyer wrote dissenting opinions.
The Nevada statute at issue provides that a police officer can detain an individual for up to one hour for the purpose of ascertaining his identity and questioning him about the circumstances that gave the officer reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed, is in progress, or is imminent. Failure to provide identification is punishable as an obstruction of justice.
Larry Hiibel was arrested by a Nevada police officer after repeatedly refusing to identify himself. The officer had been called to the scene by a concerned citizen who saw someone hitting a female passenger inside a truck. When the officer arrived, he noticed skid marks in the gravel, suggesting that the truck had been parked in a sudden and aggressive manner. Hiibel was standing outside the truck, and there was a female passenger inside the truck cab. The officer suspected that Hiibel might be intoxicated. In the course of the conversation with the officer, Hiibel refused eleven times to identify himself. He was arrested and eventually convicted of resisting a public officer. He appealed his conviction on the grounds that the identification statute violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court of Nevada upheld the statute, concluding that it did not violate the Fourth Amendment because any intrusion on privacy caused by the statute is outweighed by the benefits to officers and community safety, and the public interest in requiring individuals to identify themselves to officers when a reasonable suspicion exists is overwhelming. The Nevada court did not address the Fifth Amendment question.
The key question on the Fourth Amendment issue was whether the request for identification was a minimal intrusion into the individual’s privacy, and therefore justifiable as a “reasonable” search or seizure, or whether, given the government’s access to vast electronic databases, provision of an individual’s name allows the police officer to conduct an unjustified fishing expedition into the individual’s private information. The Court reasoned that the request for identification did not fundamentally change the nature of the Terry stop: the stop must still be limited in duration and location, and the request for identification reasonably related to the circumstances that justified the stop, as per Terry v. Ohio. In the instant case, the Court found that the officer’s request for identification was a “commonsense inquiry, not an effort to obtain an arrest for failure to identify after a Terry stop yielded insufficient evidence,” and thus did not violate the guarantees of the Fourth Amendment.
The majority concluded that the request for identification was reasonable without exploring the potential for abuse of privacy that such information provides, or even examining closely the connection between identity and the government’s interests in the instant case. The Court conclusorily states that “[o]fficers called to investigate domestic disputes need to know whom they are dealing with in order to assess the situation, the threat to their own safety, and possible danger to the potential victim,” but does not explain how the simple revelation of Larry Hiibel’s name would have helped the officer in any of the above the inquiries.
The Court rejected Hiibel’s Fifth Amendment challenge because there was no “articulated real and appreciable fear” that Hiibel’s name would be used to incriminate him, or furnish a “link in the chain of evidence” needed to prosecute him. The majority did not foreclose the possibility that a person might, in some future case, be entitled to withhold identification on valid Fifth Amendment grounds.
The lasting significance of the Hiibel opinion wll be to alter the direction of the law of Terry stops. A long line of concurring opinions and dicta had indicated that, while police officers were entitled to detain and question individuals during a Terry stop, the individuals were not obligated to answer those questions, including identification. Whatever influence that dicta once held is now vanished, and it is likely that more states will add “stop and identify” statutes to their codes (twenty states, including Nevada, currently have such laws). Given the Court’s whitewash on the question of how close the connection must be between the information requested and the circumstances of the stop, it is also likely that states will be emboldened to add requests for additional information–with minimal, if any connection to officer or victim safety–to their arrest laws
The author, Sarah Ludington, teaches legal writing at Duke University Law School and assists Chris Schroeder with the Program in Public Law.
