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>WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court announced Monday that it will decide whether people have a constitutional right to refuse to tell police who they are.

Without comment, the court said it will hear the case of Larry D. Hiibel, who refused 11 requests for identification when a Nevada sheriff's deputy detained -- but did not yet arrest -- him in response to a witness report that Hiibel was assaulting someone in his truck. When Hiibel refused to say who he was, the officer arrested him on charges of violating a Nevada law that requires a citizen to identify himself after police stop him based on "reasonable suspicion" that a crime is under way.

The Nevada appeals courts upheld Hiibel's eventual conviction and $250 fine. But Hiibel's lawyers argued to the Supreme Court that the Nevada ruling conflicted with those of several other federal and state appeals courts.

The Supreme Court decided in a 1968 case, Terry vs. Ohio, that police officers may briefly detain people based on "reasonable suspicion" of criminal conduct, rather than the higher standard of evidence required for a full-blown arrest -- "probable cause."

The court said the goal of a "Terry stop" is to help officers dispel these suspicions. But a persistent question has been what police are entitled to ask during a Terry stop, which is not an arrest but may lead to one, depending on what officers find out while detaining the suspect.

Hiibel argues that several Supreme Court justices have noted in past opinions that no one must answer questions during a Terry stop. He contends that Nevada's law, like those in several other states, intrudes on individual privacy.

"As the law now stands in some jurisdictions, a person under a shadow of suspicion, who has not committed any crime, can be approached by the police, do absolutely nothing, and yet be arrested, convicted and incarcerated," Hiibel's attorney, James P. Logan Jr., wrote in his petition for Supreme Court review.

Nevada argues that answering a police officer's request for identification is minimally intrusive -- and that Hiibel, by giving his name and address to the government to get a driver's license, had surrendered any expectation of anonymity.

"There is a continuous debate in our criminal justice system over wrongful arrests and convictions and how best to prevent them," Deputy District Attorney Conrad Hafen wrote to the court. "One of the best tools law officers have to avoid arresting the wrong person is to obtain the suspected individual's identification."

The case is Hiibel vs. Sixth Judicial District of Nevada. Oral argument will take place early in 2004, and a decision is expected by July.

Separately, the court announced it will decide whether judges may impose sentences that exceed state sentencing guidelines.

The case involves Ralph Howard Blakely Jr., a Washington state man who pleaded guilty in 2000 to kidnapping his wife and son. The trial judge, noting several especially brutal aspects of the crime, sentenced Blakely to 71/2 years in prison. That "exceptional" term, as the Washington law refers to it, is less than the maximum called for by the state's kidnapping law -- but more than the "standard" maximum prescribed by a state sentencing guideline law.

Blakely argues that the question of enhancing his sentence beyond the guidelines should have been put to a jury and the facts determined beyond a reasonable doubt.

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