TruTV’s featured trial is Nevada v. Clermont, a case in which neighborhood housewives were charged with kidnapping a child who attended their children’s school. The context is rather complex, but the bare facts are that a woman found a child walking by a roadside during school hours and picked him up and drove him to a friend, Elaine Clermont’s house, where he remained for two hours.

One In Session commentator remarked that it seems that when the Vegas cops arrest someone they immediately charge them with kidnapping (a reference to O. J. Simpson’s conviction for kidnapping during an armed robbery). And while this was a facetious remark, IMHO in both Nevada v. Clermont and Nevada v. Simpson, the state is and was stretching the kidnapping laws in order to “throw the book” at an unlikeable defendant.

A Kidnapping Juror

As a former juror in a trial involving aggravated kidnapping, I know that some jurors and juries resent it when the state seems to be piling on a defendant, no matter how unlikeable he or she may be. (O. J. was not only unlikeable, he had already gotten away with murder.) This is probably the reason Laurinda Drake (the driver) was acquitted in her trial.

After my jury experience, I researched kidnapping laws. It is clear that recent case law has expanded the concept from the crime we think of (snatching a person away from their normal haunts and concealing them somewhere else for nefarious purposes).

Judges first allowed the state to call any restraint in an isolated or concealed location during a crime “kidnapping.” In a bank robbery, for instance, if a robber drags a bank clerk inside the vault and then fends off the police, that is kidnapping. (I doubt that any juror would object to that.)

Once this expanded definition was accepted in case law, prosecutors began to charge kidnapping in any crime involving violence against a person along with some form of restraint (which frankly every such violent crime involves). In “my” case, the defendant allegedly dragged a teenage girl off a sidewalk and up a railroad embankment in order to sexually assault her. The distance from the sidewalk to the embankment was hammered by both sides, as was the definition of “a place.” It was ludicrous.

Justice Out of Control

A few years ago every house on my block displayed a sign indicating to children that it was “a safe place” where children could retreat or go to for help. The idea survives today at www.NationalSafePlace.org. Regardless of their motives or animus toward the school district, the defendants in Nevada v. Clermont don’t seem to have done anything significantly different than give a child shelter in a concern for child safety.

Nevada v. Clermont to me sounds like another instance of prosecutors “gone wild.” Surely there are laws on the books to cover this situation more reasonably. No one wants their children to be vulnerable to any physical assault by anyone in a neighborhood: no parent wants teachers to spank their kids or neighbors to bring kids inside their houses without their consent, but kidnapping is a serious crime, and the way things are going it’s soon going to be charged as frequently as any traffic violation.