IN THE unlikely event that you should find yourself in Winnemucca, a goldmining and ranching town at the foot of the Sonoma mountains in Nevada, you might hear talk of a cowboy named Dudley Hiibel. His place, the 250-acre Hot Springs Ranch on the borders of Pershing and Humboldt counties, is isolated, but he sometimes drives the 30 minutes into town. He ranches Hereford cattle and lives with his border collie, Baldy, in a tiny one-storey house without electricity, running water or phone.
The 59-year-old rancher’s idea of a shower is an outdoor pressure pipe rigged to a hot spring at the end of his drive. He has raised nine children and, apart from trying hard to be a good man and a fine rancher, that is all. You might find it puzzling, then, that he should be a topic of conversation at the barber shop or the Mineshaft Bar downtown. You might find it even more surprising that his name is about to spread to Washington and all points of the American compass. But he is at the centre of a US Supreme Court battle that strikes at the heart of the American Constitution and has potentially serious consequences for every US citizen, consequences that might one day be felt in the UK. And all because of a $250 (£140) fine.
The story began in May 2000, when he was being driven along Grass Valley Road by his daughter, Mimi. They were arguing over Mimi’s latest boyfriend and at one point in the argument Mimi slapped her father on the shoulder, an impetuous act that was witnessed by a passing motorist who reported it to the police. “It was just a father-daughter row. No more, no less,” he recalls. “We stopped at the side of the road to cool off and have a cigarette when I hear sirens and I am surrounded by police.
“I thought the pick-up must be wrongly parked, but I checked and it was fine. Then an officer asked me for identification. I refused and asked what it was all about. The officer said he was doing an investigation. He said he heard that we had had a fight and asked me for my ID again. I said no. I hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Lee Dove, of Humboldt County Sheriff’s Department, demanded 11 times that Hiibel produce identification, yet at no point did he say he simply wanted a name; he wanted papers. The encounter, filmed by one of the patrol cars, can be seen on www.hiibel.com, a website set up by civil rights supporters. “I told them they had better arrest me if I had done something wrong, so they did,” Hiibel says. “When Mimi saw them cuff me and throw me in the back of one of the police cars, she jumped out of the pick-up truck screaming ‘No!’ but they just slammed her down on the floor and arrested her.”
Hiibel was born and raised in Nevada. His great-great-grandfather was in the Prussian Army but fled to America to escape what Hiibel describes as “some kinda scandal” and to fight on the Union side in the Civil War. He was rewarded with a plot of land that Hiibel has worked for 25 years. He describes his herd as “small” and it doesn’t do in these parts to press for more information. Asking a man how many cattle he has is tantamount to asking how much he earns.
He takes up the story again. “Mimi was charged with resisting arrest, but the judge threw that out when I asked how you could resist arrest when you hadn’t been arrested for anything in the first place. I was thrown into jail and charged with failing to co-operate with a police officer. I pleaded not guilty but was fined $250. I knew this couldn’t be right. I don’t have much learning, but every schoolboy is taught the Constitution and I knew you couldn’t be arrested for doing nothing wrong.” With the support of the public defender, an impassioned lawyer called Bob Dolan, he decided to appeal and so began the journey to the US Supreme Court.
In the basement of the Winnemucca courthouse, a grand building with Neo-Classical columns and sweeping staircase, is Dolan’s cramped office. Overworked and underpaid, most public defenders might have neither the time nor inclination to appeal against a $250 fine for a misdemeanour. But Dolan did. “I read the police report and found it hard to get my head around just what criminal act my client had committed, ” says Dolan with an understated fervour. “It began to dawn on me that if a person is guilty of a crime for simply refusing to hand over his papers, then the US Constitution would be seriously undermined. If allowed to go unchecked, then the balance between the needs of the police and the protections afforded to the people would tip towards the police.
“The Fourth Amendment gives citizens the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizure. The right, effectively, to be left alone. The Fifth says that a person has the right to remain silent and that no person should be compelled in criminal cases to be a witness against himself. Remember, Dudley believed he had done nothing wrong, so he didn’t see why he should provide evidence of identity. It is important that a person behaving within the law should not be required to submit identification papers to the police. The right to anonymity is important. Imagine if you were at a demonstration and the police had the right to ask you to provide ID — they could get the names of everyone there. I think Dudley’s case will determine what kind of country we live in post 9/11: a free country where people’s right to be left alone is protected or an authoritarian state.”
Hiibel lost appeals to the 6th District Court and the State Supreme Court (by four votes to three) before four US Supreme Court judges accepted that here was a constitutional issue that needed to be settled. The judges had been perplexed by an almost identical case in which a court in Nevada ruled in favour of the citizen and against the police. That court was a federal rather than a state court, so here was a problem: the federal court system considered what happened to people like Hiibel to be unconstitutional, whereas the state system did not.
That meant that the US Supreme Court would have to decide which system was right, and Hiibel’s case was listed as one of only 80 this year. Nine judges will hear the case on March 22 and their decision will be binding.
What they must decide, however, is much more complex than a cowboy’s right to be stubborn. As is usual in such cases, the devil is in the detail, but there is much that we can take and use in our own debate on whether we should have a compulsory ID card scheme in the UK.
The law at the centre of the argument dates back to 1968 in a case called Terry v Ohio that went all the way to the US Supreme Court. That case determined that an officer required “probable cause” to believe that a crime had been committed in order to demand that a person should identify him or herself. Without such cause, a suspect could refuse to answer or even listen to questions put by a law enforcement officer. A year later the state of Nevada introduced Revised Statute 171.123, which changed “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion”. It is this legislation that civil rights campaigners claim is unconstitutional.
