Hiibel V. Sixth Judicial Court of Nevada Essay Example

inside the truck, and the man appeared to be intoxicated. The officer observed skid marks in the gravel by the truck, which led him to suspect that the truck had come to a sudden stop.

In Terry v. Ohio (1968), the Court recognized that an officer’s reasonable suspicion that a person may be involved in criminal activity permits the officer to detain the person for a limited amount of time and take additional steps to investigate further. Based on the principles of the Terry decision, Justice Kennedy stated that the Nevada statute, which requires a suspect to disclose his name in the course of a valid Terry stop, was consistent with Fourth Amendment prohibitions against unreasonable search and seizure.The officer’s request for Hiibel’s name was “reasonably related in scope to circumstances which justified” the stop.

Justice Kennedy regarded the officer’s request as simply a commonsense inquiry, not a specific effort to obtain an arrest; in order to properly assess the situation and prevent harm to themselves and their potential victims, officers involved in domestic disputes need to know who they are dealing with. Therefore, obtaining a suspect’s name in the course of a Terry stop serves important government interests.Hiibel had also claimed that his conviction had violated the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on self-incrimination. The Court rejected the Fifth Amendment challenge, stating that disclosure of Hiibel’s name presented no reasonable danger of incrimination.

Hiibel’s refusal to disclose his name was not based on any “articulated real and appreciable fear” that his name would incriminate him, or that it would “furnish a link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute him. In the grand scheme of the

situation, disclosing a name is likely to be so insignificant that it would only incriminate the suspect in the most unusual circumstances. The Court did not agree that this case fell under the category of unusual circumstances. Therefore, upholding the Nevada Supreme Court’s judgment, it decided that Hiibel’s arrest did not violate the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.