Here is an excerpt from David Clark's book "101 Ways to Beat a Marijuana Charge in Georgia." You can get your copy here.

See our other blogs about this book:

• "101 Ways to Beat a Marijuana Charge in Georgia"
• Dave Clark's Interview
• Never Consent to Any Search
• All About Drug Dogs

People ask me all the time, "Do I have to give the police my name and date of birth?"

The answer is No, unless they have some facts to justify stopping you for questioning. The U.S. Supreme Court said, in Brown v Texas, "In the absence of any basis for suspecting [you] of misconduct, the balance between the public interest and [your] right to personal security and privacy tilts in favor of freedom from police interference. . . .[E]ven assuming that [a legitimate law enforcement] purpose is served to some degree by stopping and demanding identification from [you] without any specific basis for believing [you are] involved in criminal activity, the guarantees of the Fourth Amendment do not allow it. When such a stop is not based on objective criteria, the risk of arbitrary and abusive police practices exceeds tolerable limits."

The Brown rule was adopted in Georgia in one of my first appellate cases, Holt v State: "Where circumstances do not provide an officer with articulable suspicion (less than probable cause, but greater than mere caprice) that the law has been or is about to be violated, the officer's act of detaining and questioning an individual is nothing more than a police-citizen encounter outside the scope of the officer's ‘official' police duties." The Court ruled that the cop's inquiry into Mr. Holt's name and date of birth was not based upon articulable facts indicating that he had engaged in, was engaging in, or was about to engage in criminal activity.
In Georgia, if the cop has no reasonable articulable suspicion that you are breaking the law, he cannot lawfully ask for your name. Note: be polite, and don't lie. None of the cops I know understand this rule, and it is definitely against the law to give a false name and/o DOB to a cop. If you're driving, you must give him your license.

If you are loitering, you will be arrested for not giving your name, as they are allowed to presume a bad purpose for the loitering. Always offer to move along or leave the area if the cops ask you your name and you're holding weed. That way they can't say you're loitering. Or give him your name and DOB and say nothing more. You are not loitering if you are a passenger in a car, or visiting a friend's house, or in a place where normal people normally hang out. You have to be in a place where normal law-abiding people aren't usually hanging out. Plus your being there has to give rise to a legitimate public safety concern (alarm). Otherwise, the cops are interfering with your lawful right to travel /peaceably assemble and violating your Fourth Amendment rights.

Bottom line - you are probably going to be arrested in Georgia if you refuse to identify yourself upon command. Under the Constitution, you technically don't have to provide your name, ID, or date of birth to a police officer. He can ask, but he can't require an answer. If you have a run in with the law and the only reason you were arrested was for failing to provide ID upon command, and they searched you incident to arrest and found weed, your lawyer can win that case.