Brown v. Texas, 443 U.S. 47 (1979), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court determined that the defendant's arrest in El Paso, Texas, for a refusal to identify himself, after being seen and questioned in a high crime area, was not based on a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing and thus violated the Fourth Amendment.

[2] His summary of the factual elements of the case includes the following: Two police officers, while cruising near noon in a patrol car, observed appellant and another man walking away from one another in an alley in an area with a high incidence of drug traffic.

One officer testified that he stopped appellant because the situation "looked suspicious and we had never seen that subject in that area before."

"[3]The finding held that: The application of the Texas statute to detain appellant and require him to identify himself violated the Fourth Amendment because the officers lacked any reasonable suspicion to believe that appellant was engaged or had engaged in criminal conduct.

Penal Code § 38.02(a) has since been revised to only make it a crime to refuse to identify oneself after being lawfully arrested.