Louisiana Makes Refusing Your Name a Crime Once You Are Detained, and Since 2024 Your License Too

Two Louisiana instruments have to be read together, because the one that authorises the demand is not the one that punishes refusal. La. Code of Criminal Procedure article 215.1(A) provides that a law enforcement officer may stop a person in a public place whom he reasonably suspects is committing, has committed, or is about to commit an offence, and may demand of him his name, address, and an explanation of his actions. That article creates the power to ask; on its own it attaches no penalty. The penalty comes from R.S. 14:108, the resisting an officer statute, whose Subsection A defines the crime as intentional interference with, opposition or resistance to, or obstruction of an individual acting in his official capacity and authorised by law to make a lawful arrest, lawful detention or seizure of property, where the offender knows or has reason to know the person is acting officially.

Subsection B(1) then defines obstruction by enumeration, and paragraph (c) is Louisiana's identification duty: refusal by the arrested or detained party to give his name and make his identity known to the arresting or detaining officer, or providing false information regarding the identity of such party. The trigger words matter. The duty attaches to a person who is arrested or detained, not to someone in a consensual encounter, and it is a duty to identify rather than to answer questions. Article 215.1(A) also lets an officer demand an explanation of your actions, but no paragraph of R.S. 14:108(B)(1) makes silence about your actions an offence, so the explanation and the name sit on different footings.

Acts 2024, No. 276 added paragraph (f), which is aimed squarely at traffic stops and is unusually conditional. It makes it obstruction to fail to provide or display a state-issued driver's licence or identification on the officer's request, but only where three things are true at once: the person is the operator of a motor vehicle, the person has been lawfully detained for an alleged violation of a law, and the officer has exhausted all resources at his disposal to verify the identity of the person. That last condition is the one Louisiana drivers should notice, because it means the offence is not committed the moment a licence is not handed over.

The same subsection reaches two other situations worth knowing. Paragraph (d) makes it obstruction to congregate with others on a public street and refuse to move on when ordered by the officer. Paragraph (e) makes it obstruction to knowingly interfere with a police cordon by intentionally crossing or traversing it, defines a police cordon as any impediment or structure erected for crowd or traffic control or to prevent passage at the scene of a crime or investigation, and expressly extends the cordoned area to the airspace above it, so flying a drone over a scene is covered; where a drone in the cordon endangers the public or an officer's safety, law enforcement or fire department personnel are authorised to disable it.

Who counts as an officer is defined in Subsection B(2) by reference to the peace officer definition in R.S. 40:2402, and the statute spells out that it includes deputy sheriffs, municipal police officers, probation and parole officers, city marshals and deputies, and wildlife enforcement agents. On the other side of the encounter, article 215.1(B) and (C) limit what the officer may do physically: he may frisk the outer clothing for a dangerous weapon where he reasonably suspects he is in danger, may search the person where he reasonably suspects a dangerous weapon is possessed, and if he finds a weapon may keep it until questioning ends, at which point he must return it if it is lawfully possessed or make an arrest. Article 215.1(D) adds a time limit for drivers: an officer may not detain a motorist longer than reasonably necessary to complete the investigation of the violation and issue a citation, absent reasonable suspicion of additional criminal activity.

S. 14:108 is punished by Subsection C with a fine of not more than five hundred dollars or imprisonment for not more than six months, or both. That is the charge a Louisiana officer writes for a refusal to identify by someone who is under arrest or lawfully detained, and for a motorist who will not produce a licence once the conditions in paragraph (f) are met. S. 2 creates resisting an officer with force or violence, covering threatening force by a person sought to be arrested, resistance using force after arrest, injuring or attempting to injure a police officer on duty, or using or threatening force toward an officer performing any official duty, and Subsection C of that section sets the penalty at a fine of not more than two thousand dollars or imprisonment with or without hard labour for not less than one year nor more than three years, or both.

S. 2(B) defines police officer broadly for that purpose, reaching commissioned police officers, sheriffs and deputies, marshals and deputies, correctional and juvenile detention facility officers, constables, wildlife enforcement agents, state park wardens and probation and parole officers. A person who believes a stop was unlawful has the standing route in La. art. I, section 5, which gives any person adversely affected by a search or seizure conducted in violation of that section standing to raise its illegality in the appropriate court.