The American Spectator

The Supreme Court has just opened up a neat new legal defense. Here I am, a felon, going about my unlawful business. A policeman with no knowledge of my crimes stops me and demands identification. I refuse, am arrested, and am subsequently charged with my real crimes.

p>Ah-hah! But! Since I had in fact committed a crime, my Fifth Amendment rights are in full flower. So the policeman’s demanding my name caused me to incriminate myself by getting arrested and investigated for not supplying it. Therefore, since it is clearly coerced self-incrimination, the demand for my identity was plainly unconstitutional and it, and all the subsequent evidence from the ensuing investigation, as fruits of the poison tree, are inadmissible and I can walk out of the court whistling. br> — Richard McEnroe /p>

There sure seems to be a lot of hyperventilating over the Hiibel decision. A cop gets a message that some guy with a pickup truck is pounding on some woman at a certain spot. He goes there, there is a guy, a truck and a woman. So he asks the guy his name. (Is this guy on the scene of a reported crime out under a fugitive warrant maybe or a restraining order, or what have you.?)

p>Sure seems a reasonable request to me. br> — Richard Trochlil /p>

God! This one really makes my blood boil! Watch the video referred to in the article and see if you don’t agree.

Unfortunately, Mr. Hiibel and his attorney apparently missed a fundamental fact in their zeal to fight his arrest on Constitutional grounds.

The Supreme Court’s Opinion characterizes the “Terry Stop” as follows:

The sheriff’s department in Humboldt County, Nevada, received an afternoon telephone call reporting an assault. The caller reported seeing a man assault a woman in a red and silver GMC truck on Grass Valley Road. Deputy Sheriff Lee Dove was dispatched to investigate. When the officer arrived at the scene, he found the truck parked on the side of the road. A man was standing by the truck, and a young woman was sitting inside it. The officer observed skid marks in the gravel behind the vehicle, leading him to believe it had come to a sudden stop. The officer approached the man and explained that he was investigating a report of a fight. The man appeared to be intoxicated. The officer asked him if he had .any identification on [him],. which we understand as a request to produce a driver’s license or some other form of written identification. The man refused and asked why the officer wanted to see identification. The officer responded that he was conducting an investigation and needed to see some identification.

Setting aside the fact that this “investigation” was proceeding from an anonymous phone tip from an unidentified witness (much has been litigated and written about the differences between an unknown witness and a “qualified” witness insofar as Probable Cause is concerned), we have two interesting observations by the arresting officer. One, there were skid marks behind the truck, and Two, “The man appeared to be intoxicated.” These totally gratuitous facts are prime examples of what defense lawyers call “Creative Writing” in police reports when, after the heat and passion of the arrest have subsided, the officer sits and fills out his Arrest Report and realizes that he needs to pad the circumstances a bit to justify the arrest. But the Supreme Court sees fit to mention them as if they had any bearing on whether or not the stop was lawful.