kidnapping

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Powerful stories about abduction predate the history of the United States. Biblical, mythological, and historical tales recount the fates of prominent people—Joseph, the Sabine women, Helen of Troy, and various members of royalty—taken from their homelands. During the Middle Ages, peripatetic Jewish merchants talked of abduction as just another business risk, and contributing to a ransom fund for a landsman qualified as a substantial mitzvah.

The conquest and colonizing of the Americas generated new abduction tales. The slave trade, the business of abducting and enslaving millions of Africans (and lesser numbers of Indians), took shape during the early seventeenth century. As European diseases exacted a heavy toll on indigenous people, Indian warfare increasingly aimed at abducting members of other tribes to replenish populations. At the same time, stories of Indians carrying off European women, "captivity narratives," such as that of Mary Rowlandson, formed one of the earliest Euro-American literary genres. The term "kidnapping," which joined two English slang terms, emerged toward the end of the seventeenth century. It first denoted abducting young people from Britain and transporting them to North America as indentured laborers. Consequently, Sir William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century common-law jurist, characterized kidnapping, then a misdemeanor rather than a felony, as the crime of carrying someone away from their homeland and depriving them of their "personal liberty."

Stories about other kinds of kidnapping, many with an ethnic dimension, proliferated during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The antislavery movement characterized the capture of runaway slaves, authorized by the Constitution and the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850, as a pernicious form of kidnapping. Drawing on Blackstonian legal terminology, many Northern legislatures passed "personal liberty laws" that unsuccessfully interposed state power against slave hunters. Other ethnically charged situations, such as the 1904 "rescue"—by Anglo-Protestant vigilantes—of forty Catholic orphans who had been placed with Mexican American families in Arizona could legally excuse abductions that might otherwise have been seen as cases of kidnapping.

Meanwhile, a much-publicized 1874 abduction in Philadelphia, in which several career criminals abducted for ransom (and later killed) four-year-old Charley Ross, inaugurated a growing emphasis on urban kidnapping stories. In response to the Ross case, Pennsylvania enacted a stiff antikidnapping law that made kidnapping a serious felony offense and became an early model for other states. As kidnapping for ransom became a highly publicized underworld enterprise, some perpetrators avoided the stigma attached to child abduction by making wealthy adults their target of opportunity. George "Machine Gun" Kelly became J. Edgar Hoover's "Public Enemy Number One" after kidnapping an Oklahoma City business leader in 1933. Around the same time, a brazen, daylight kidnapping of a wealthy businessman by gangsters in an up-scale neighborhood of St. Paul ended a police-gangster arrangement that had long made Minnesota's capital city a haven for interstate fugitives such as John Dillinger.

Two other widely publicized incidents, though, reinforced the connection between kidnapping and young children. The 1924 case of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who abducted and killed a young boy in Chicago, focused attention on cases involving sexual motives, while the 1932 kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh Jr., son of the fabled aviator, dramatized abduction for ransom. These cases produced lengthy, controversial "trials of the century" and sparked debate over broader issues including the insanity defense and the death penalty in the Leopold-Loeb case. In the aftermath of the Lindbergh case, Congress passed the "Lindbergh Act" of 1932, which expanded federal authority over kidnapping with its presumption that any abduction of more than twenty-four hours involved transportation across state lines. Many states adopted their own tougher, new antikidnapping measures called "Little Lindbergh laws."

During the last half of the twentieth century, kidnapping stories encompassed an ever wider array of fictive and real-life scenarios. The 1974 abduction of Patricia Hearst, the daughter of a prominent media mogul, by the Symbionese Liberation Army, recalled politically motivated kidnappings in other countries. Several years later, when an anti-American faction in Iran seized nearly one hundred people at the American Embassy in Tehran, the media proclaimed "America Held Hostage," and the incident played a key role in the 1980 presidential election of Ronald Reagan and the defeat of incumbent Jimmy Carter. The kidnapping of U.S. businesspeople and diplomats remained a prominent concern overseas, while abductions that accompanied carjackings and other crimes attracted considerable attention in the United States.

Still, cases involving young children attracted the most intense interest. Bitter controversy over child custody laws, for example, publicized a form of abduction in which one parent resorted to kidnapping in order to circumvent a court order granting custody to the other. In 1980, Congress responded with the Parental Kidnapping Prevention Act, which mandated greater state-to-state cooperation in custody-related abductions. Advocates for children, though, insisted on a clear distinction between parental kidnappings and "stranger abductions," which became firmly associated with the specter of sexual exploitation. Several tragic cases of stranger abductions prompted new legislation, such as "Megan'S LAw," which aimed for the registration and monitoring of "sexual predators." Other prominent kidnappings produced new nationwide organizations, including the Adam Walsh Children's Fund and the Polly Klaas Foundation for Missing Children.

Bibliography

Fass, Paula S. Kidnapped: Child Abduction in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Gordon, Linda. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Morris, Thomas D. Free Men All: Personal Liberty Laws of the North, 1780–1861. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974.

The crime of unlawfully seizing and carrying away a person by force or fraud, or seizing and detaining a person against his or her will with an intent to carry that person away at a later time.

The law of kidnapping is difficult to define with precision because it varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. Most state and federal kidnapping statutes define the term kidnapping vaguely, and courts fill in the details. The federal kidnapping statute, for example, defines kidnapping in part as an offense wherein a person kidnaps another person (18 U.S.C.A. § 1201).

Generally, kidnapping occurs when a person, without lawful authority, physically asports (moves) another person without that other person's consent, with the intent to use the abduction in connection with some other nefarious objective. Under the Model Penal Code (a set of exemplary criminal rules fashioned by the American Law Institute), kidnapping occurs when any person is unlawfully and nonconsensually asported and held for certain purposes. These purposes include gaining a ransom or reward; facilitating the commission of a felony or a flight after the commission of a felony; terrorizing or inflicting bodily injury on the victim or a third person; and interfering with a governmental or political function (Model Penal Code § 212.1).

Kidnapping laws in the United States derive from the common law of kidnapping developed by courts in England. Originally, the crime of kidnapping was defined as the unlawful and nonconsensual transportation of a person from one country to another. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, states began to redefine kidnapping, most notably eliminating the requirement of interstate transport.

On the federal level, Congress passed the Lindbergh Act in 1932 to prohibit interstate kidnapping (48 Stat. 781 [codified at 18 U.S.C.A. § 1201 et seq.]). The Lindbergh Act was named for Charles A. Lindbergh, a celebrated aviator and Air Force colonel whose baby was kidnapped and killed in 1932. The act provides that if a victim is not released within twenty-four hours after being abducted, a court may presume that the victim was transported across state lines. This presumption may be rebutted with evidence to the contrary. Other federal kidnapping statutes prohibit kidnapping in U.S. territories, kidnapping on the high seas and in the air, and kidnapping of government officials (18 U.S.C.A. §§ 1201 et seq., 1751 et seq.).

A person convicted of kidnapping is usually sentenced by the court to prison for a certain number of years. In some states, and on the federal level, the term of imprisonment may be the remainder of the offender's natural life. In jurisdictions that authorize the death penalty, a kidnapper is charged with a capital offense if the kidnapping results in death. Kidnapping is severely punished because it is a dreaded offense. It usually occurs in connection with another criminal offense, or underlying crime. It involves violent deprivation of liberty, and it requires a special criminal boldness. Furthermore, the act of moving a crime victim exposes the victim to risks above and beyond those inherent in the underlying crime.

Most kidnapping statutes recognize different types and levels of kidnapping and assign punishment accordingly. New York, for example, bases its definition of first-degree kidnapping on the purpose and length of the abduction. First-degree kidnapping occurs when a person abducts another person to obtain ransom (N.Y. Penal Code § 135.25 [McKinney 1996]). First-degree kidnapping also occurs when the abduction lasts for more than twelve hours and the abductor intends to injure the victim, accomplish or advance the commission of a felony, terrorize the victim or a third person, or interfere with a governmental or political function. An abduction that results in death is also first-degree kidnapping. A first-degree kidnapping in New York is a class A-1 felony, which requires a sentence of at least twenty years in prison (§ 70.00).

New York also has a statute prohibiting kidnapping in the second degree. A person is guilty of second-degree kidnapping if she or he abducts another person (§ 135.20). This crime lacks the aggravating circumstances in first-degree kidnapping, and it is ranked as a class B felony. A person convicted of a class B felony in New York can be sentenced to one to eight years in prison (§ 70.00).

Two key elements are common to all charges of kidnapping. First, the asportation or detention must be unlawful. Under various state and federal statutes, not all seizures and asportations constitute kidnapping: police officers may arrest and jail a person suspected of a crime, and parents are allowed to reasonably restrict and control the movement of their children.

Second, some aggravating circumstance must accompany the restraint or asportation. This can be a demand for money, a demand for anything of value, an attempt to affect a function of government, an attempt to inflict injury on the abductee, an attempt to terrorize a third party, or an attempt to commit a felony.

In most states, kidnapping statutes specify that any unlawful detention or physical movement of a child, other than that performed by a parent or guardian, constitutes kidnapping. This means that an abduction of a child need not be accompanied by some other circumstance, such as extortion or physical injury, to qualify for the highest level of kidnapping charge. In the absence of an aggravating circumstance, an unlawful, nonconsensual restraint or movement is usually charged as something less than the highest degree or level of kidnapping.

Many states have enacted special laws for car-jacking, a specialized form of kidnapping. Generally, car-jacking occurs when one person forces a driver out of the driver's seat and steals the vehicle. Car-jacking is a felony whether the aggressor keeps the victim in the car or forces the victim from the car. In California, a car-jacking statute is contained within the penal code's chapter on kidnapping, and it authorizes a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole for a person found guilty of car-jacking (Cal. Penal Code § 209.5 [West]).

Kidnapping laws are similar to laws on unlawful or felonious restraint, parental kidnapping, and false imprisonment. These crimes cover the range of unlawful movement and unlawful restraint cases. Felonious or unlawful restraint, also known as simple kidnapping, is the unlawful restraint of a person that exposes the victim to physical harm or places the victim in slavery. It is a lesser form of kidnapping because it does not require restraint for a specified period or specific purpose (such as to secure money or commit a felony). False imprisonment is a relatively inoffensive, harmless restraint of another person. It is usually a mis demeanor, punishable by no more than a year in jail. Parental kidnapping is the abduction of a child by a parent. The law on parental kidnapping varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction: some jurisdictions define it as a felony, others as a misdemeanor. Many states consider parental kidnapping less offensive than classic kidnapping because of the strong bond between parents and children.

The chief judicial concern with the charge of kidnapping is double jeopardy. Double jeopardy is multiple punishment for the same offense, and it is prohibited by the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Kidnapping often is an act that facilitates another offense, such as rape, robbery, or assault. Rape, robbery, and assault often involve the act of moving a person against her or his will, which is the gravamen (significant element) of a kidnapping charge. Thus, a persistent problem with kidnapping prosecutions is determining whether a kidnapping conviction would constitute a second punishment for the same act.

Legislatures have passed statutes and courts have fashioned rules to prevent and detect double jeopardy in kidnapping cases. Generally, these laws and rules hold that for kidnapping to be charged as a separate crime, some factor must set the asportation apart from a companion crime. Most courts will sustain multiple convictions if the asportation exposes the victim to increased risk of harm, or results in harm to the victim separate from that caused by the companion offense. In other jurisdictions, the test is whether the asportation involves a change of environment or is designed to conceal a companion offense.

In most states, an asportation of a few feet may constitute the separate offense of kidnapping; in other states, distance is not a factor. In New York, for example, the focus of the kidnapping statute is not distance but purpose. Thus, an asportation of twenty-seven city blocks may not constitute kidnapping if it is merely incidental to a companion crime (People v. Levy, 15 N.Y.2d 159, 256 N.Y.S.2d 793, 204 N.E.2d 842 [Ct. App. 1965]). Likewise, an asportation from the borough of Manhattan to the borough of Queens may not constitute kidnapping if it plays no significant role in the commission of another crime (People v. Lombardi, 20 N.Y.2d 266, 282 N.Y.S.2d 519, 229 N.E.2d 206 [Ct. App. 1967]).

Some states have eliminated the asportation element from their kidnapping statutes. In Ohio, for example, kidnapping is defined in part as restraining the liberty of another person (Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2905.01 [Baldwin 1996]). This creates an increased risk of double jeopardy in kidnapping convictions because, by definition, every robbery, rape, or assault would constitute kidnapping. However, the Ohio state legislature has enacted a statute that prohibits multiple convictions for the same conduct unless the defendant exhibits a separate animus (separate intent) to commit a separate crime (§ 2941.25). Whether the prosecution proves a separate animus to kidnap is a question of fact based on the circumstances surrounding the crime.

In State v. Logan, 60 Ohio St. 2d 126, 397 N.E.2d 1345, 14 Ohio Op. 3d 373 (1979), the Supreme Court of Ohio held that the defendant could not be convicted of both rape and kidnapping when he had moved the victim a mere few feet and had released the victim immediately after the rape. Under the facts of the case, the asportation had no significance apart from the rape offense. According to the court, the defendant had displayed no animus beyond that necessary to commit rape, so punishment for both rape and kidnapping was not warranted.

In contrast, in State v. Wagner, 191 Wis. 2d 322, 528 N.W.2d 85 (Ct. App. 1995), the appeals court upheld a separate conviction for kidnapping. In Wagner, the defendant approached two women on two separate occasions in a Laundromat. Both times, the defendant tried to force the women into a bathroom to rape them. He was convicted of two counts of attempted first-degree sexual assault, one count of kidnapping while armed, and one count of attempted kidnapping while armed. On appeal, he argued that he should not have been convicted of kidnapping because, under section 940.31(1)(a) of the Wisconsin Statutes, kidnapping is defined in part as the carrying of a person "from one place to another," and he had not taken his victims to another place. The court disagreed, holding that forced movement from one room to another falls within the meaning of the kidnapping statute. Ultimately, the appeals court affirmed the defendant's sentence of seventy-two years in prison.

See: Hearst, Patty; Lindbergh Kidnapping.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: (law) the unlawful act of capturing and carrying away a person against their will and holding them in false imprisonment
  Synonym: snatch