Editorial: Tough call on names

Tuesday, June 22, 2004 | 9:22 a.m.

Four years ago a Humboldt County police officer approached someone on the side of road because there had been a report that he had been hitting his daughter. The police officer asked the man, who was standing outside his truck, for his name. But the man, whose daughter was sitting inside the truck, refused to divulge his name -- 11 times. The police later discovered that he was Larry Hiibel, a Northern Nevada rancher, but not before he was arrested -- and subsequently convicted -- for refusing to identify himself.

Hiibel claimed that Nevada's "stop and identify" law, which requires people detained by an officer under suspicious circumstances to identify themselves, violated his Fourth Amendment rights and the Fifth Amendment's ban on self-incrimination. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court and on Monday, in a 5-4 decision, it ruled that Hiibel's rights hadn't been violated.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in his dissenting opinion, agreed with Hiibel that identification can be incriminating and is therefore unconstitutional. But the majority of the justices contended that since Hiibel was stopped based on reasonable suspicion, it was a "commonsense inquiry" for an officer to demand his name. Justice Anthony Kennedy noted that knowing someone's name can help an officer determine whether the individual is wanted for a crime or has a history of violence. And, for that matter, knowing someone's identity can help clear an individual as a suspect if he hasn't done anything wrong. Furthermore, the court held, Nevada's law minimally affected privacy rights since an individual only has to say his name -- he doesn't have to answer any other questions.

This isn't an easy call to make -- balancing privacy rights against those of public safety -- but in the circumstances of the Hiibel case, we believe that the Supreme Court, for the reasons the majority outlined, made the right decision in upholding Nevada's law.