Kidnapping

In this episode, I will discuss the crime of Kidnapping and will talk about two kidnapping cases I worked.

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Is it illegal to spread untrue rumors or tell lies about someone? What are the issues people have with halo or flock cameras? Have you ever thought something seemed like entrapment and wondered why it wasn't? Hello and welcome to Inside the Criminal Process, a podcast where I discuss and explain the criminal justice system in America using real-life examples and true trime true crime cases. My name is Scott, and I'm a 29-year veteran law enforcement officer and an attorney. I've worked as a patrol officer, a crime scene investigator, a field training officer, a detective, a parole officer, an investigator, a polygraph examiner, a crisis negotiator, and an administrator. I've also taught college-level criminal justice classes. In today's episode, I'm going to cover a couple of kidnapping cases that I worked. In this state, first degree kidnapping is basically forcibly seizing and carrying a person from one place to another, or enticing the person, or persuading a person to go from one place to another, or imprisoning or forcibly secreting a person, and forcing the victim or another person to make a concession or give up anything of value in order to secure the release of the person under the offender's actual or apparent control. So basically it's just taking somebody and then demanding some type of ransom, right? If the victim suffers bodily injury, it's a class one felony, which is the most serious felony. It's a class two felony if the victim is liberated unharmed prior to the offender's conviction. So the statute also says that no person shall be sentenced to death if the victim is released alive prior to conviction of the kidnapper. That's the rule I talked about in a previous episode when I talked about the Joseph Wombaugh's book, The Onion Fields, where they kidnapped those police officers and then decided to kill them, the detectives, and they decided to kill them because they knew they were going to get the death penalty for the kidnapping. Second degree kidnapping is a class four felony, and that's basically knowingly seizing and carrying a person from one place to another, not literally or physically carrying them, but just transporting them from one place to another without the person's consent and without lawful justification. And that movement has to increase the risk of harm to the person. Obviously, whenever you're going to take somebody, you're going to risk them fighting back and them getting injured, accidentally killed, something of that nature. Class three felony, it's if you intend, so that's second-degree kidnapping, but if you intend to sell, trade, or barter the victim for consideration, and in this case, consideration means uh the promise of something of value given in exchange for something of value. So when you hear for do you hear term a legal term for due consideration, that just means basically you're exchanging something for something else, and that both things have to be a value. So a lot of times when people sell something to somebody to make it a legal sell, there has to be consideration. So they'll sell it at a at a discounted rate or even for a dollar, um, just so that it's a it's an actual contract and it's lawfully binding and legal. If the kidnapper uses a deadly weapon or any item used or fashioned in a manner to cause a person to reasonably believe that the article is a deadly weapon, or if the perpetrator represents verbally that he or she is armed with a deadly weapon, it's still a class three felony. So that's pretty serious. I told you number one is the most serious, a class one felony is the most serious, two, three, four, five, six, etc, etc. And as you go down that line, there's fewer and fewer um years for sentences that the judges can issue. It is a class two felony, second-degree kidnapping, if the victim kidnapped is a sec a victim of sexual of a sexual offense, or a robbery, or the victim is a child under 18 who's not known to the perpetrator, and the perpetrator intends to keep or conceal the child from his or her parent or legal guardian, or has the intent to sell trade or barter such child for consideration. So there's all sorts of stuff that plays into this, like a simple kidnapping can turn into um all of this different stuff where the the district attorney has to look at all these issues and decide, you know, what exactly the charges are going to be. There's also the crime of false imprisonment in this state, and that's basically confining or detaining another without their consent and without proper legal authority. Um it doesn't apply to police officers acting in good faith. So a police officer arrests somebody, didn't really have probable cause at the time, but didn't know that they were acting in good faith on either a warrant or the thought that they had probable cause. That's not going to be false imprisonment. Um false imprisonment is a misdemeanor unless the perpetrator used force or threats to confine or detain the person, or the person is confined or detained for 12 hours or longer, or circumstances causing bodily injury or serious emotional distress and the victim is under 18. Or tying, caging, chaining, or using other physical restraints that cause bodily injury or serious emotional distress. And bodily injury can be just basically pain. It doesn't have to be like a major wound or anything like that. That's when you get into the serious bodily injury definition, and that obviously makes it a more serious offense. There's also a section in the statutes that says statutory privilege between doctor and patient and the statutory privilege between husband and wife is not available for the purpose of excluding or refusing testimony in any prosecution brought into the section. So you can't kidnap your spouse and then basically say, well, they can't testify against me because of the spousal privilege. So one day while I was working as a patrol officer, it was the afternoon. Um I was called to a restaurant on a kidnapping report. Uh it was on a pretty busy street in the district where I was working. I spoke with the manager, and he told me that one of the kitchen staff had been arrested by an INS agent. So back in the early 2000s, ICE didn't exist. The agency responsible for uh immigration enforcement was the immigration and nationalization service, which is was the INS. Um, I got all the information about the kitchen worker, name, date of birth, address, phone number, etc. Because the the manager obviously was suspicious that this person wasn't a true INS agent. And um, so I got all the all the information. And uh the manager said that the kitchen worker is the restaurant owner's nephew. So he had called the owner and told him. He gave me the owner's number. I tried to call him, but he didn't answer, so I left a message for him to call me back. Um the owner called me while I was trying to figure out you know how to get a hold of somebody at INS and ask them if they had arrested this person or if they'd taken him. And um he told me that he was at the the owner of the restaurant told me he was at his nephew's house with the INS agent and police officers from a neighboring jurisdiction. The owner was frustrated and angry. I had a hard time understanding him. He had a very thick accent. Um, him and his nephews were both, his his nephew were both from Iran. Um, I think that the owner was a permanent resident of the U.S., but the nephew was on a work visa or or some type of uh temporary status. So I asked him to let me talk to one of the police officers. I talked to a police officer that was at the scene and and asked why they were there. Uh the officer said that they received a request for assistance from an INS agent who was trying to determine the immigration status of an Iranian national that he had arrested. So I asked, I just basically asked him a simple question. I said, Have you verified that the INS agent is legitimate? And he got uh he said he had a badge, and I pointed out, hey, you know, badges aren't hard to get anymore. You can order them or whatever. Um, I said, Did you see any legitimate law enforcement identification? This officer, he might have been a sergeant with the other agency, I don't remember, but he got really, really angry, cursed at me, asked why I was questioning him, accusing me of telling him how to do his job. Um I said, dude, I'm just trying to figure this out. You know, it doesn't make sense to me. At the uh at the time, it really wasn't common for INS agents to show up and arrest people at their homes or at the work sites. Um they just they went to the jails and interviewed or picked up people who who were on INS holds uh for not having proper identification, but they they didn't typically go to somebody's house or place of business that I knew of. Um maybe, maybe they did elsewhere. So back during this time, if you arrested somebody that didn't have a valid ID or driver's license, you would you could add INS hold to the paperwork. Um, and then the sheriff's office would would notify INS, who would come and determine if the person was in this country legally. That early that ended um in the early 2000s, and the mayor of the city I was working in ordered that the jail couldn't hold anyone just because they didn't have valid ID or driver's license. You could only jail and hold people for whatever crime you were charging them with. You couldn't put an INS hold on them. Um, and uh so the I don't know how INS was was still finding out that people were in the jail, but this was like probably 2000, 2001, 2002, something like that. Anyway, the officer didn't like my tone and he wouldn't speak to me any longer. So after a couple minutes, the restaurant owner called me back and said the police had left and that he wouldn't let the INS agent arrest his nephew. He said there was a scuffle between him and the INS agent, and that INS agent jumped in his car and was trying to take off. The restaurant owner said he reached through the open back window and ripped ripped the temporary license plate tag out of the back window of the car. Uh that's obviously strange in a red flag because no law enforcement officers don't typically, you know, I don't know of any that drove around in in vehicles with temp tags on them um taped to the back window. So I asked the restaurant owner to meet me at the district station so he could give me the temp tag and I could get more information from him. So he showed up, the owner did, and he gave me a wrinkled up temp tag. It was torn, wrinkled, battered. Um he said that his nephew was safe at that at the house. And uh he told me that the INS agent had taken his nephew's immigration paperwork and told him there was an error and that the nephew wasn't in the country illegally, or that wasn't in the country legally, rather. And and so the restaurant owner said what started the scuffle, because right before the scuffle, the INS agent told them that if they paid a certain amount of money per month, he wouldn't arrest the nephew and he'd take care of the the issue with the paperwork um for them, but they had to they had to agree to pay him uh a certain amount of money a month. So obviously that's a red flag as well, right? So I had to figure out who this INS agent was based on the registration of the temporary tag. So whenever there's a temporary tag in this state at the time, the you couldn't just run it on the computer system and pull up the registration information. You had to call Department of Motor Vehicles and have a clerk go hand search for the information, um, just because temp tags weren't weren't listed on the computer database. I don't know if they are now, but it uh it was kind of an involved process. So I got the information from the DNV, DMV, and looked up the uh phone number, and I called this guy, and he told me that he was a contractor with the INS and he was responsible for arresting people who were thought to be in the country illegally. He couldn't provide any names of INS employees, supervisors, managers, anybody that could confirm his story. So I asked him to come to the district station so that I could talk to him in person, see his credentials, and then I'd give him his temp tag back when he showed up at the station. He never came in to the station. Um I guess I probably wasn't really expecting him to, because by now I had kind of figured out this this was probably some type of uh some type of scam. So I wrote my report, uh, booked the temp tag into evidence, and pretty much forgot about the case. And then several months later, an assistant district attorney called me and told me the INS agent was a fraud. He was actually in the U.S. illegally himself and had been contacting immigrants, mostly from Iran, and I think it was a language issue. He he spoke, um, they spoke the same language, and he had been extorting these people for money in exchange for not reporting them to the INS. And and the district attorney told me most of the people actually had their paperwork was in order. Um, but this guy was just kind of rogue and they had been looking for him for quite a while. So trial came up. I testified at the at the trial, he represented himself. Uh the district attorney um did their direct act direct examination, and then when when I was done testifying for the for the prosecution, the judge asked the man if he wanted to cross-examine me. He stood up and said, I don't recognize the United States government as having authority over me, and I object to these proceedings. Um, he had been responding to the judge with every every time she asked him for information, or when she asked him if he wanted to cross-examine a witness. Any other thing he was asked to respond to, he stood up and he said this same thing. And I'm just paraphrasing it. I'm not sure what the exact words were, but it was clearly he had he had memorized um what he thought he was supposed to say. Didn't work out for him. He was convicted of kidnapping uh PAW, P-O-W-P-O, that stands for possession of weapon by a previous offender. I think there was an assault charge, false imprisonment, etc. Uh the feds and locals didn't charge him with um impersonating an officer because he wasn't really representing himself as an officer. He was representing himself as a contractor. I think they could have charged it, maybe not got a conviction, but they could have probably charged it. Uh, but I think they thought they had enough enough um charges on there as it was. So um, yeah, I think that's that's kind of a weak reason not to at least charge him with that, because I think you could convince a jury that that's as bad as impersonating an officer. He was sentenced to something like 60 or 70 years. So while we were there, um when I was waiting to testify, I met the officers from the neighboring jurisdiction uh and the one that was a jerk to me, and uh, they were jerks to me during the trial, too. The DA had this had an office in the courthouse where victims and prosecution witnesses could hang out while waiting to be called to testify. Um, we were in that little room, and um it was it was uh an atmosphere that was a little tense and awkward because I I made some kind of comment about how did you are you guys doing training now on recognizing legitimate credentials? Um you know, should have just kept my mouth shut, but I just couldn't help it. I like to say I told you so. Interestingly enough, about nine years later, I was working as a prison investigator and I had to go to the coroner's office in a in one of the metropolitan counties to observe a partial autopsy of an inmate that had died in one of the prisons. The autopsy had been completed, but the doctor hadn't checked the man's rectum for drugs, and there was information that came out after the autopsy, like the same day but afterwards. Um there was information that the man may have put drugs in his rectum and had a bag of and the bag had broke and he had possibly overdosed um on drugs, which they would figure out they would figure out eventually anyways, but the um we needed the the drugs over obviously, so um it's not an uncommon practice for inmates to put drugs in their rectums. Uh we called it keystring, but I believe the more appropriate term is body packing. So I go to this coroner's office, the funeral home pulled into the garage of the coroner's building, and the doctor was there, and this coroner's office contracted with the doctor that was out of state. So I think um I don't know if he flew back to the state after the autopsy, then it had to come back, but it was it was a big mess. And the coroner's coroner was not happy, the doctor was not happy. He should have been because he was probably making a ton of money. So he goes, they open the body bag, the doctor slices through the crude stitches in the man's abdomen. He reaches in with a scalpel and removed the lower section of the of the inmate's bowel. And he showed me that there was nothing in there, which by the way was unnecessary. He could have just told me that. But um, I was actually relieved because I didn't want to have to collect these drugs that had been inside of a corpse or inside of anybody, for that matter, um, for several days. So, and who do you think that man was? He was the fraudulent INS agent. Uh, he had a very unique name, and I recognized it as soon as as soon as I was getting information for the for the report. So, yeah, I had several interactions with this this fraudulent INS agent. The next story is about a young girl, uh, I think she was about 14 years old, that had arrived home late for dinner, told her parents she had been kidnapped from the local uh rec center. If I remember right, her parents were very strict, and of course, you know, they freaked out, called the police. Of course they would, anybody would. I arrived, the paramedics were there checking on the girl, and the parents were like frantic, obviously. So I'm talking to the girl. She told me and my partner that she had been at the rec center, was heading home when a man grabbed her outside of the rec center, pulled her through the parking lot to his car. She said he tied her up, put her on the floor in the back seat of the car. Um, she said he really didn't say anything except telling her to be quiet. She said they drove around for a couple hours. He didn't touch her inappropriately or do anything to harm her physically. Uh, she had a very vague description of the man in his car. I turned to my partner and I was like, hey, listen, I'm gonna go and see if the rec center has any video. Um, because I think they have cameras in the parking lot and in the front of the building. So, and I remember thinking she's looking at me weird. She's kind of side-eyeing me, the girl, the victim, and had a concerned look on her face. So I went out, drove to the rec center. It was closed. I didn't see any cameras out front. Again, this is the early 2000s, so um that it wasn't really a thing back then. I went back and asked my partner to step outside. He told me she hadn't provided any more information really. Uh, as we walked in the house, the girl was just bawling her eyes out, and her father was looking at me, and uh he looked at her and he's like, uh tell these officers what what you just told me. So she admitted that she had made the story up to keep from getting in trouble, from get for getting home late. Uh, she said she didn't have any idea that it was gonna cause such a major response. Her and her parents were so apologetic, I didn't even consider charging her with five filing a false report. Um, sometimes you just walk away. I think she was gonna get in enough trouble with her parents as it was. So we didn't need to add fuel to the fire and charge her with uh with false reporting. Now, if we had reviewed hours of surveillance video, had aired something on the news about the person or spent a great amount of time uh and energy on trying to find this this guy, uh, she may have gotten a ticket for filing a false police report, which is a misdemeanor. And that, by the way, that's another example of how police can use deception in other ways, not just during an interrogation, even though I hadn't done it intentionally. Um, but you know, she had she had heard what I was gonna do, and that that that ended up making her come claim. So, on to the questions. Is it illegal to tell lies about someone or spread rumors about somebody? So this state used to have a a law called criminal libel. Basically, if you disparaged somebody's character um or said something negative about them, it you could be uh Charged with a class six felony if you did it in writing or verbally. And it had to cause them some type of harm, mental anguish, you know, reputational harm, economic harm. And it was a class six felony. That law has since been repealed. So there is no criminal consequences. There are no criminal consequences in this state for spreading rumors, lies, or saying negative things about somebody. And it appeared through my research that other states have basically about half the states in the U.S. have criminal libel or slander laws, but they don't seem to be enforced. And a lot of them have actually been struck down on First Amendment grounds. And I don't know if that's why Colorado's was repealed or not. But there is a tort, and I think I've mentioned it before, a tort is a civil wrong that covers defamation. So you can still sue someone. So defamation is a false statement of fact communicated to a third party that harms someone's reputation. In that case, like if you sue somebody for that, you have to prove that the statement is false, that it was published or conveyed to others, that it caused some type of harm and was made with a certain level of fault. So knowingly, recklessly, intentionally. Standard of fault is different for public figures than it is for a private individual. Public figures actually have to prove actual malice, meaning that the statement was known to be false or the person exhibited a reckless disregard for the truth of its falsity. Private individuals, they're held to a negligent standard, so the plaintiff has to show that the publisher of the statement, or the speaker of it, or the writer of it, that's what the publisher is, failed to exercise reasonable care in verifying the facts before conveying those the statement to others. So there's two forms of definite defamation, libel and slander. And it really depends on the medium of the false statement. So libel is written or published, either printed or digital. Slander is spoken or ephemeral. Ephemeral just means lasting a very short time, short-lived or transitory. Defenses to like if somebody sues you for libel or slander or defamation, uh if you can prove that your statements were true, that's a defense. If you if it's an opinion that you're just voicing an opinion about them, that is a defense. Um and there's certain privileges as well, like the statement was made in court or something like that, that you wouldn't help be held accountable for. So state laws vary regarding procedures, the uh statutes of limitations, etc. And I think it's Florida requires a timely filing, and they may consider social media posts as liable if they're false statements of fact. But you always have to look at your own state's law when you're when you're uh trying to do something like this and see if they've actually violated that law. So court awards, a plaintiff may recover damages for reputational harm, emotional distress, financial loss, you know, that would all be um included in the in the trial, the court case. Second question what is the issue people have with halo and flock cameras? So we know that uh well, I don't know if you if you know, but the the mayor of Seattle um is trying to explain why there were no surveillance cameras at at a f some festival they had downtown and there was a shooting, and um so the police are having a really hard time trying to solve this murder case. Uh I think the mayor's assertion is that the federal government was misusing the cameras for some type of immigration enforcement operations. I'm not sure if that's the case. Um, and I think the state of Washington had passed some privacy laws, and the mayor's concern somewhat was also complying with those laws. It's a balancing test, really. Um I'm no fan of the government intruding in our private lives and and being all up in our kitchens and involved in our private business. But some things are extremely helpful for police, and that benefit may outweigh the detriment. So um possibly, I mean, I would have to look at statistics on how much the cameras have helped and how much their use has been abused uh rather than what seems to be going on now. People are just speculating about the misuse. So I didn't know it at the time, but when we had that escape that I talked about, I think in the last issue, I could have contacted the the state patrol here in this state and notified them of the stolen car that the escapee was driving. And they could have put that into a database and we would have known where on the highway the escapee was because they have these the flock cameras that read the license plates. And um, and they those are easy, very easy to use, I guess. You just punch in a license plate and it'll tell you it it tracks, you know, you'll even you can find out the direction of travel. I guess they have them, they have them in quite a few places in this state. So it turned out we didn't need to because the cops caught him real quick when he entered the other state. But uh it honestly to me, it seems like a great tool um for issues where the police know what car a person is driving and the license plate number of that car. Uh it seems that it would be really helpful in kidnappings, amber alerts, motor vehicle thefts, wanted person cases, stuff of that nature. So uh there are people who balk about all the surveillance that goes on. But honestly, if it helps the police to solve crimes or find someone, I'm all for it. And uh really the surveillance is only happening in public places. So we all know that you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in uh in public areas. Uh I just saw a story of an Indiana deputy that used his access to flock cameras to stalk his girlfriend or wife. Um he used the license plate cameras in Indiana. You know, and that's that's one case. So I think people cite that case a lot and say, well, what about this guy? You know, I'm not sure that warrants getting rid of all of them. In my opinion, you know, the best way to deal with that type of thing is that you put more policies in place to address issues like that that may come up. Um, maybe more audits, warnings like if a specific plate is being queried by someone, et cetera. Um, there's always ways to deal with the issue rather than unreasonably over-the-top responses. So, and then in the in in a headquarters building I worked in, ATF had um what's called a shot finder. It's not a camera, but and it's really has nothing to do with cameras, but they put it on the building, the top of this building that I worked in, that was in a not so great area of the city, and it would it could identify it's military technology, um, but it could identify gunshots, and it was tied directly to the police department. So when there was a gunshot in the area, the police were notified and they would dispatch officers there and they could tell them how close it was to this building and what direction it was from that building. So I thought that was a really cool tool. Um, you know, they said it was it was pretty busy sending out uh alerts to the police in that area specifically. And then third question have you ever thought something seemed like entrapment and you wondered why it wasn't? So entrapment is basically a legal defense that requires two key elements. First, the government has to or a government actor has to induce you um to commit the crime, and you have to have a lack of predisposition to commit the crime. So those are two key elements, the government inducement, and that basically that's the idea that the government asserts the the idea to commit the crime, that it comes from the government agent. So that's the person that is that is that has the idea to commit the crime, police officer, in for informant, whatever, rather than the defendant. I mean, or somebody acting on the police's behalf, not necessarily an informant, but if somebody acting on the police's behalf encourages you to commit this crime, that meets that that uh that element. Uh the gu the government has to actively per persuade or coerce the defendant to commit the crime, and it has to be beyond merely providing an opportunity to commit it. So inducement, that can be tactics like persuasion threats or appeals to sympathy, um you know, that that overcome the defendant's reluctance to engage in criminal conduct. Then lack of predisposition that you have to prove that you had, um the defendant has to show somehow that they were not predisposed to commit the crime before being approached by the government. So it means the defendant was not ready and willing to engage in criminal activity without the government's involvement. Uh courts often evaluate the defendant's state of mind and prior behavior, obviously, to determine predisposition. If the defendant has a history of similar criminal behavior, uh shows eagerness to participate in the crime, um, that may indicate predisposition, which can negate entrapment as a defense, obviously. So both those elements have to be established. Um, if either are missing, then the defense will likely fail. Uh the concept of entrapment kind of serves as a safeguard against overreaching law enforcement. So it's trying to ensure that individuals aren't unjustly induced into committing crimes they wouldn't have otherwise, they would not have otherwise considered. The burden is on the defense to prove with preponderance of the evidence that there was government inducement and the lack of predisposition on the part of the defendant. Um, there's a lack of predisposition to commit the crime. So in summary, entrapment is just it's a complex legal defense. I don't know how often it's used or how often it's successful, uh, but it hinges on the actions of the government agents and the defendant's state of mind. Um so I've seen many issues working on the task force mostly where I felt that it that that the government was entrapping a person. Um but evidently they didn't, nor did the U.S. attorney. So who might have who might have called them out on it, right? That's it for this episode. In the next episode, I'm trying to line up an interview with someone I've mentioned on the on a previous episode. So um as always, thank you for listening and take care.