Tuesday, December 24, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Your papers, please

Four Nevada high court justices endorse police state

About the only good thing about Friday's state Supreme Court decision that Nevada police can demand of any citizen, anywhere, that he present proof of identification is that it was a close vote.

Three stalwart justices set their jaws and stood firm in a desperate rear-guard defense of our remaining, fast-eroding freedoms, insisting we are not yet -- or shouldn't be -- living out a scene from one of those old black-and-white war movies in which the Gestapo officers in the wide-brimmed hats strut through the train full of terrified escapees, demanding that everyone show their "travel papers, please."

The case began in May of 2000, when Humboldt County Deputy Sheriff Lee Dove was sent by dispatchers to a site where a caller had reported seeing a man strike a girl inside a truck.

Arriving at the scene, Deputy Dove found a man who later turned out to be Larry Hiibel standing outside a truck. Mr. Dove later testified that he believed Hiibel to be intoxicated and that his daughter was sitting inside his truck. Mr. Dove demanded to see the man's identification 11 times. Eleven times the man refused, because he did not believe he had done anything wrong.

Under a law which pretends to require Nevadans to identify themselves to police upon demand, Mr. Hiibel was later convicted of resisting and obstructing a police officer in the performance of his duties. He appealed to the state Supreme Court, where a slim, four-member majority Friday abandoned the cause of privacy and freedom, delivering us instead into the hands of police-state tyranny.

To be forced to reveal one's identity to a cop, even if you're simply standing by the roadside -- Justice Cliff Young wrote for the majority -- is not an invasion of privacy because people give each other their names every day "without much consideration" -- this is merely part of "polite manners," Justice Young explains.

Then, Justice Young goes on to offer the rationale which has justified every police state from the dawn of tyranny -- that any minor "intrusion on privacy" is "outweighed by the benefits to officers and community safety."

"Knowing the identity of a suspect allows officers to more accurately evaluate and predict potential dangers that may arise during an investigative stop," Justice Young wrote for himself, Chief Justice Bill Maupin, and fellow Justices Myron Leavitt and Nancy Becker.

Can Justice Young still recall anyone who might once have said, "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"?

With the growing threat to our constitutional liberties in this post-Sept. 11 atmosphere, "Now is precisely the time when our duty to vigilantly guard the rights enumerated in the Constitution becomes most important," wrote Justice Deborah Agosti, in a brave and ringing dissent joined by Justices Bob Rose and Miriam Shearing.

The "true test of our national courage" is "our necessary and steadfast resolve to protect and safeguard the rights and principles upon which our nation was founded, our constitutional and our personal liberties," Justice Agosti concludes.

Amen to that.

Yes, a policeman's lot can be slightly less safe and convenient in a free country. But ask anyone who survived Russia in the 1930s, Germany in the 1940s, China in the 1950s, or Cambodia or Chile in the 1970s, how much "safer" it felt to live in a nation where everyone was tracked, numbered, and required to show their "papers, please," on demand.