The Octopus Grows Another Tentacle

The Supreme Court has ruled - 5 to 4, naturally - that you have no right to remain silent when police ask you your name. Nominally, they can only ask you during a "Terry" search in which they have "reasonable suspicion" (less than probable cause) to believe you've been involved in a crime. But since that's a legal conclusion solely in the police's judgment, then effectively it's not a bar to them getting your ID anytime. In other words, people don't know what a Terry stop is, and even if they did, they don't know if any given interaction with police is a Terry stop (because the reasonable suspicion is all determined from the police's knowledge.)

Thanks, conservatives! Let's get more judges on the Court like Scalia and Rehnquist, right?

Comments

[Oldman]

This is a dangerous anti-libertarian infringement on civil rights. It goes rightly to the modern legal doctrine of privacy. If one does not have the right to remain silent, and therefore to not engage in a potentially incriminating incident with the police, then what does one have a right to? The right to avoid the police is as fundamentally American as why we affirm that our income taxes are correct as opposed to being forced to prove it up front.

Self identification is a small step but a chilling one.

[Oldman]

This is a dangerous anti-libertarian infringement on civil rights. It goes rightly to the modern legal doctrine of privacy. If one does not have the right to remain silent, and therefore to not engage in a potentially incriminating incident with the police, then what does one have a right to? The right to avoid the police is as fundamentally American as why we affirm that our income taxes are correct as opposed to being forced to prove it up front.

Self identification is a small step but a chilling one.

[rick pietz]

I've been watching this story. I'm not sure how much play this gets in the media, but this may be "the" watershed decision of this court.

This court seems to have gone past just reversing or reconsidering previous court decions, and has refuted what popular culture thinks is 'American'. Because when I lose the right, under threat of law, to maintain any level of anonymity, what right to privacy do I have left?