Aggravated False Imprisonment

Aggravated False Imprisonment

The definition of common-law kidnapping has a built-in structure, and seeing it explains how the offense is organized. Kidnapping was aggravated false imprisonment: the base wrong was an unlawful confinement, and the one added fact that raised it to kidnapping was conveying the victim out of the country.¹ Described from the other direction, the greater crime is the lesser crime plus a single aggravating fact. A court sorting a fact pattern therefore starts with the base wrong, and the label kidnapping enters only when the border-crossing removal is layered on top of it.

Layering one aggravating fact on a base offense grades the wrong by what is added. The confinement already carries the injury to the victim's liberty, so the removal is what raises the offense from the base crime to the greater one. The structure has a practical consequence for charging. Because kidnapping contains every piece of false imprisonment, proof of the greater offense necessarily proves the lesser one, and an actor whose conduct falls short of the border crossing still answers for the base offense. The line between the two crimes also rests on a single objective fact, the destination at the end of the journey, so it does not shift with how frightening the episode was or what the actor hoped to gain.

False imprisonment needs no movement at all, since the actor can hold the victim in place where the victim already is.² Asportation, the carrying away of a person, is the ingredient kidnapping adds, which is why the removal element did the sorting in the previous section. Some jurisdictions go further and treat a secret imprisonment as kidnapping even without a trip abroad.³ That expansion is a modern departure from the baseline taught here, and a later section returns to it.

Kidnapping also has neighbors that look similar and are different crimes. In People v. Adams a Michigan appellate court catalogued the common-law offenses: false imprisonment was a misdemeanor consisting of compelling a person to stay where the person is or go elsewhere against his will by unlawful force; kidnapping was the aggravated form of that offense; and extortion was a separate misdemeanor, the collection of an unlawful fee by an officer under color of office.⁴ Robbery, in turn, is a taking of property from a person by force or by putting the person in fear.⁵ The court concluded that kidnapping is historically and definitionally a different crime from false imprisonment, extortion, or robbery.⁶ It then declined to read the kidnapping statute as a catchall, refusing to treat any detention aimed at extracting some advantage as kidnapping when there was no meaningful asportation and no secrecy.⁷

The reason for that refusal comes from how penalties are graded. Each of these crimes carries its own definition and its own punishment, set by the legislature for the particular wrong. If kidnapping could be stretched to cover any detention that resembles extortion or robbery, the severe penalties attached to kidnapping would reach conduct the legislature graded differently, and the separate definitions would stop mattering.

The two scenes differ in whether a confinement exists, and that fact decides whether the base offense is present at all. Modern statutes do reach a seizure carried out for ransom, as a later section explains, but that coverage comes from the statute and not from the common-law definition.⁹ The trap on an exam is treating kidnapping as a general-purpose enhancement for any crime that involves a threat, a demand, or a restraint. The question is always whether the facts show an unlawful confinement and then whether the single aggravating fact, removal from the country, was added to it.

The analysis therefore runs through the base offense, and the next section defines it. At common law, false imprisonment consisted of unlawfully confining a person without that person's valid consent, and each part of that definition (confinement, unlawfulness, and the absence of valid consent) is an ingredient that kidnapping inherits.¹⁰