On Mon, 2004-01-12 at 01:07, Tim May wrote:On Jan 11, 2004, at 2:12 PM, bgt wrote:
On Sun, 2004-01-11 at 13:57, Tim May wrote:I don't know if he did, but of course there is no requirement in the
U.S. that citizen-units either carry or present ID. Unless they are
driving a car or operating a few selected classes of heavy machinery.
Many states do have laws allowing the police to detain a person for a period of time (varies by state) to ascertain the identity of that person, if they have reasonable suspicion that they are involved in a a crime.
Duh. Yes, "arrests" are allowed, and have been in all states and in all
Perhaps I wasn't very clear. That is (in many states, probably not all), a cop may stop (detain) someone on "reasonable suspicion", but it would still be illegal to arrest the person (since this would require "probably cause").
This has come up various times on the Net. I'm not a lawyer, but I take "arrest" to mean "not free to move on." As in a state of arrest (cognate to rest), arrested motion, arrested development. Hence the common question: "Am I under arrest?," with the follow-up: "If not, then I'll be on my way."
Arrest is not the same thing as being booked, of course. Many who are arrested are never booked. Arrest, to this nonlawyer, is when a cop tells me I am not free to move as I wish, that he will handcuff me or worse if I try to move away from him.
I expect our millions of lawyers and hundreds of billions of court hours have produced a range of definitions, from "the cop wants to know why you're reading a particular magazine, and will cuff you if you give him any lip" to "all black men within a 5 block radius are being detained for questioning, but are not under formal arrest" to "you're under arrest, put your hands behind your back" to shooting first and Mirandizing the corpse.
I am under arrest if I am in an arrested state of movement, that is, not free to move as I wish.
In these states, at this point the person is required by law to identify himself, and in some states even to provide proof of identification. If the person cannot or will not do this, it is legal in those states (though as we know, blatantly unconstitutional) to further detain or even arrest the person until their identity can be determined.
Again, people need to read up on the Lawson case. And absent an internal travel passport, there is no requirement to carry ID. That some states haven't heard about the Lawson case, or the Fourth Amendment, is no excuse.
You must mean /mandatory/ "state ID". Every state I've lived in have State ID's that are (voluntarily) issued to residents that can't get or don't want a driver's license. All of these states grant their ID the same status as a driver's license for identification purposes (anywhere that accepts driver's license as valid ID must also accept the state ID).
As I said, there is no requirement to carry ID except when doing certain things (like driving). Whether some or most states will issue licenses to those who don't or can't drive is irrelevant: they are not REQUIRED to be carried, so not having one cannot possibly be a crime.
Read up on the Lawson case in San Diego.
(Thanks Steve for the links).
I provided "Lawson" and "San Diego." Plenty of stuff to find hundreds of discussions. I favor giving unique information sufficient in a Google search, not providing pre-digested search URLs.
--Tim May
"We should not march into Baghdad. To occupy Iraq would instantly shatter our coalition, turning the whole Arab world against us and make a broken tyrant into a latter- day Arab hero. Assigning young soldiers to a fruitless hunt for a securely entrenched dictator and condemning them to fight in what would be an unwinable urban guerilla war, it could only plunge that part of the world into ever greater instability." --George H. W. Bush, "A World Transformed", 1998
