Know your rights: "stop-and-identify" laws

Now, there are probably things that I shouldn't share in this blog, but the fact that I have zero readers makes it okay to say this, I think. The only brush with the law I have ever had was in the form of a near-arrest, or so I thought. When a car I was the passenger of was pulled over for reasons that cannot be disclosed (note that it was not anything we had really done wrong; no speeding or drunk driving or anything, just a situation of being in the wrong place at the wrong time).

In this, one of the most frightening experiences of the last year, the driver was asked to present their license, which they promptly did. I was then asked to present mine, which I did not have because I had not been driving. We were both utterly perplexed when the police officer began screaming at us and threatening to take me to the juvenile detention center.

"Why don't you have your license?" he hollered.

At a loss for words, I stammered "Because I wasn't driving anywhere, and didn't anticipate getting pulled over."

"Well, you're out in public, aren't you?" the officer again insisted. "Everyone knows that you need to carry your ID with you out in public!"

Nobody had known this alleged fact though, thankfully I narrowly escaped the arrest by the police officer though; however, this situation has made a permanent impression upon my mind.

I never told my parents about this event, and plan to save it for their death beds, but I did do some investigation on my own to figure out this 'ID law' and here is what I found:

Essentially, that police officer was wrong and had no right to yell at me in the manner that he did. The facts behind this are the 2004 Supreme Court Case known as Hiibel v. Sixth Judicial District Court of Nevada. In this case, Hiibel was arrested and convicted for refusing to identify himself during a routine stop.

Nevada, and many other states, has a law that requires a person to tell an officer his name if asked, these are known as "stop-and-identify" laws. Iowa does not have a "stop-and-identify" law. However, Hiibel challenged his conviction, claiming that it violated his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself and his Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches. The state intermediate and Supreme Court rejected his argument in affirming the conviction.

In conclusion, it was decided that the search did not violate the Fourth Amendment because it was based on reasonable suspicion and involved only a minimally intrusive question. Id also was deemed not to violate the Fifth Amendment.

However, in Iowa the fact that we do not have "stop-and-identify" statues says that a police officer cannot require random people to identify themselves.

But the best bet in this situation is just to be prepared; take your ID with you when you go places and don't put yourself in situations that could be incriminating.