Court Opinion

ID: 9546025
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 17:23:54.254091+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T15:15:54.740777
License: Public Domain

HENRIOD, Justice
(dissenting).
I respectfully dissent. When plaintiff was arrested he was minding his own business. He had complied with the officer’s request to display his driver’s license, and was thumbing through his wallet to find his registration certificate. At that instant he had committed no misdemeanor in the officers’ presence. As a citizen he could have resisted arrest by using whatever force necessary. At that instant the *350die was cast in this case which should demand a reversal.
A man’s person is as much his castle as his home, and there is even more reason to protect the former than the latter. Only defense urged to the unwarranted arrest was a failure, — not a refusal, — -to display a registration certificate. This writer’s guess is that such defense was a convenient afterthought, — one which, if valid, was not an answer here, since it appears obviotts to me that the facts indicate that at the time of the arrest plaintiff was trying to comply with the request. It is significant that plaintiff was never charged with this offense, but with vagrancy, assault and battery and resisting an officer, — on each of which charges he was exonerated.
The statement of the main opinion that plaintiff “avoided giving his army identification card” on request, is a complete non sequitur, since no law requires him to do so absent an offense having been committed. And when one of the officers asked plaintiff to explain his presence on the street at such an early hour, plaintiff’s rejoinder that it was “None of your damn business” was a most resonant echo back to the Battle of Runnymede, — far more significant to me than the echo stemming from the main opinion’s old story illustrating that “our surroundings echo back to us just about what we project to them.”
A statement by Judge Evans' in Roe v. Lundstrom,1 a similar case decided by us, is as true today as it was then: “Except in emergencies where a prohibited offense or breach' of the peace is committed or threatened, a police officer is protected only when armed with a warrant.”

. 1936, 89 Utah 520, 57 P.24 1128, 1130.