Following the outrageous killing of Elijah McClain, protesters engaged in what was described as an “occupation-style protest” by sitting down and surrounding the Aurora, Colorado police station.
The July 3 protest in Aurora, Colorado, seemed, at least on the surface, like just another of the hundreds of racial justice protests that have swept the nation this year. Demonstrators sat outside a police station chanting and playing music. Although they said they wouldn’t leave until their demands were met, the protesters were cleared out by police around 4:30 a.m.
Big deal? A big enough deal that three of the leaders of the protest have been charged with attempted kidnapping.
Lillian House, Joel Northam, and Whitney “Eliza” Lucero are among a group of Denver-area activists facing a slate of charges related to their protest activities this summer. Local prosecutors say the activists tried to kidnap police by holding a short-lived “occupation”-style protest outside the precinct and blocking its doors.
They’re scheduled to be arraigned on the kidnapping charges on March 9th. Crazy? Of course, but it’s worth understanding what the Colorado kidnapping statute prohibits.
(1) Any person who does any of the following acts with the intent thereby to force the victim or any other person to make any concession or give up anything of value in order to secure a release of a person under the offender’s actual or apparent control commits first degree kidnapping:
(a) Forcibly seizes and carries any person from one place to another; or
(b) Entices or persuades any person to go from one place to another; or
(c) Imprisons or forcibly secretes any person.
The key word can be found in subsection (c), “imprisons.” It doesn’t mean what most people think it means.
(1) Any person who knowingly confines or detains another without the other’s consent and without proper legal authority commits false imprisonment. This section does not apply to a peace officer acting in good faith within the scope of his or her duties.
(2) False imprisonment is a class 2 misdemeanor; except that false imprisonment is a class 5 felony if:
(a)(I) The person uses force or threat of force to confine or detain the other person;
By encircling the police station, did the protesters “confine” the officers “trapped” inside? Was there a show of force, that had an officer walked outside and tried to walk through the ring of protesters he or she would have been accosted? Would the officers have had a justifiable fear that leaving the police station to cross the circle of protesters there would have been a potentially violent confrontation?
It is, of course, an absurd scenario, as if the cops were afraid of the protesters such that they were “imprisoned” within the station, and the felony charges leveled at the three protest leaders are hyped up to either strike fear in others or be used as bargaining chips in negotiating a plea. And while the right to protest is constitutional, that does not provide a defense to engaging in conduct in the course of the protest that’s criminal.
This effort to twist a protest into a kidnapping is a substantively ridiculous notion, but it is a reminder that when criminal statutes are enacted, the language is often deliberately vague so as to cover a broad array of conduct that people fear could be kidnapping. This is yet another example of NYU Lawprof Rachel Barkow’s “lumpy laws” problem, where laws are crafted for overbreadth lest any bad dude get away. It’s the antithesis of Blackstone’s ration, better that three protest leaders be convicted than one kidnapper go free.
Even so, this application of kidnapping law is so far beyond the pale as to be laughable, except that no felony charged is a joke.
“This characterization that someone quote-unquote kidnapped officers is absolutely ridiculous,” Ryan Hamby, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the Marxist group with which House, Northam, and Lucero are affiliated, told The Daily Beast.
“It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious,” he added.
He’s got a point.
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