ID cards+law history;

citizenQ citizenQ at ziplip.com
Sun Sep 23 20:00:13 PDT 2001


The scholarly informed citations are useful and interesting.  But haven't we been put on notice that "a rebalancing" is going to occur, "it's a new world" and we will "use every measure at our disposal to combat terrorism" ?? - I fear it is naive to imagine that case law and legal precedent can combat the legislative onslaught to come. 

>
>The power to arrest--or otherwise to prolong a seizure until a suspect had
>responded to the satisfaction of the police officers--would undoubtedly
>elicit cooperation from a high percentage of even those very few
>individuals not sufficiently coerced by a show
>of authority, brief physicaldetention,
>and a frisk. We have never claimed that expansion of the power of police
>officers to act on reasonable suspicion alone, or even less, would further
>>no law enforcement interests. See, e.g., Brown v. Texas , 443 U.S. 47, 52,
>99 S.Ct. 2637, 2641, 61 L.Ed.2d 357 (1979). But the balance struck by the
>Fourth Amendment between the public interest in effective law enforcement
>and the equally public interest in safeguarding individual freedom and
>>privacy from arbitrary governmental interference forbids such expansion.
>See Dunaway v. New York, supra; United States v.
>Brignoni-Ponce , 422 U.S., at 878, 95 S.Ct., at 2578-2579.
>Detention beyond the limits of Terry without
>probable cause would improve the effectiveness of legitimate police
>investigations by only a small margin, but it would expose individual
>members of the public to exponential increases in both the intrusiveness
>of the encounter and the risk that police officers would abuse their
>discretion for improper ends. Furthermore, regular expansion
>of Terry encounters into more intrusive detentions, without
>a clear connection to any specific
>underlying crimes, is likely to exacerbate ongoing tensions, where they
>exist, between the police and the public. See Report of the National
>Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 157-168 (1968).
*





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