I agree with this. I do not think of your identifying yourself as voluntary when the officer asks for your ID. The law states you should show your LTC when an officer demands ID. It does not ever define what they mean by "demand" and it does not say only when you are required by law to identify yourself. I think any court would interpret the word demand in this case as when an officer requests your ID.G.A. Heath wrote: ↑Sun Sep 13, 2020 8:14 am The LEO did demand ID, while you were not required to show ID under normal conditions this demand had no basis in law for a normal situation, which this was.
As an aside, there is still a lot of confusion in law enforcement circles on when a person must produce his identification. In general, officers believe it to be when you are lawfully detained, lawfully arrested, are driving a vehicle, or if you are carrying a weapon. The law is actually clear that you do not have to identify yourself when you are simply detained, just you may not provide false identification. But as with the recent incident in San Antonio, many officers do not understand this well. Many citizens do not understand that if you fail to provide the identification, the officer can legally take you downtown (or back to a crime scene) to get proper ID on you. When you are arrested, you do not have to produce identification but simply must provide the officer with your correct name, date of birth, and home address. Both of these are covered in Penal Code Section 38.02.
Interestingly enough, you are required under Transportation Code section 521.025 to display your driver's license to any magistrate, court officer, or peace officer if you are required to have one (operating a motor vehicle on a public street), but there is a defense to prosecution that you showed the license in court. As with the lack of a penalty for the LTC, this makes it debatable if it is truly against the law to not show your DL to a police officer who stops you. Of course, the more immediate problem in that case is how to convince the officer to give you a ticket instead of arresting you and taking you to jail if there was an offense committed. As a side point, Texas law specifically allows a police officer to stop you just to see if you have a DL, though I doubt that this law would stand up in court under a Fourth Amendment challenge (based on stopping cars at random, not a checkpoint type operation).
Which gets us down to if you have to show your DL and LTC when you are armed. Government Code 411.205 says you must display both your LTC and your DL or ID Card when a peace officer demands ID. As I said above, I think the word demand is going to be interpreted by courts as "asked for" and the law does not give any circumstances other than if you have a handgun on or about you. Since you were unarmed, you were not required by law to produce the LTC at that time. This is also further complicated by the removal of the penalty for not showing the LTC when asked.
In all of these cases, you get down to one very important question. Do you want to proceed on your way with the minimum of inconvenience or not? I strongly support your ability to stand on the law and your rights and now cooperate with the officers. As a general rule, cops are people and respond to people who treat them as people. Your best bet when dealing with police in almost any situation is to cooperate with what they ask. You may not be required to ID yourself, but you stand much better odds of being allowed to go on your way when you cooperate than when you do not. Same with just getting a ticket instead of being arrested, or getting your property from another person who is cooperating. You can always fight the case in court later, or file a complaint on the officer after the incident.
Look at the recent jogger incident in San Antonio. In the long run, I am not sure i would say the jogger won. He was arrested and spent at least one night in jail. Yes, the case was dismissed by the DA refusing the charges. But he still spent time in jail and will have an arrest record (unless he pays a lawyer to get it expunged). He could have avoided this by just showing the officer his ID so the officer could know that he was the person they had been looking for. And he was only set free because the officers wrote the arrest report for assault on an officer, a felony. From my reading of the media, he did not meet the elements of the offense of assault so the DA could easily kick the case. If the officer had not gotten greedy and had gone for the class A misdemeanor instead, I doubt the DA would have dismissed the charge of resisting transportation quite so easily.
Sometimes you need to stand firm on your rights. Sometimes, the best tactical answer is to cooperate.