The Identification Principle
Edwards and Clark Comparative Insight
The identification principle refers to how officials and institutions identify those on whom duties of criminality must be imposed. In simple terms if one is t be arrested for a crime who should it be? How do we identify those persons and how do we know that identification is correct? In Laws are Made to be Broken Edwards references the idea of reasonable cause for arrest, in many law abiding states in order to be arrested for a crime the official doing the arresting must have reasonable cause to do so, some sort of proof of your involvement. Likewise in most law abiding states in order to be convicted there needs to be evidence beyond a reasonable doubt for your conviction, or a preponderance of the evidence in some cases. In order to stay these standards the officers imposing duties of the law often turn to what some might consider shortcuts to find reasonable cause.
One example given by Edwards is if a police officer went to the scene of an assault and arrested a woman based on her having tattoos, then found evidence linking to the assault after the fact. In non-philosophical language we usually call this profiling.
While Edwards gives many similar examples of such scenarios in his piece, Clark focuses on one example built into the law. In many states, including South Carolina, you can be arrested legally for traveling with burglary tools, burglary tools refer to any tool that could be used in assistance of a burglary, or any household tool. This law is not put in place because it is actually a danger to society to carry burglary tools, rather because it gives an officer of the law a legal avenue to detain someone that they do not otherwise have reasonable cause to detain.
Clark and Edwards seem to be in agreement that the legality of the institutions which enforce the law tend to blur in these situations. Both of them examine the identification principle as something that measures how much an institution or official is guided by the law itself.