10.5 Non-Homicide Crimes Against the Person

Non-Homicide Crimes Against the Person

IV. Non-Homicide Crimes Against the Person

                          ┌──────────────────────────────────────┐
                          │     Crimes Against the Person        │
                          └──────────────────┬───────────────────┘
                                             │
         ┌──────────────────┬────────────────┴──────────────────┬──────────────────┐
         ▼                  ▼                                   ▼                  ▼
     [Battery]          [Assault]                       [False Imprisonment]  [Kidnapping]
- General intent        - Dual definition:              - General intent      - General intent
- Unlawful force          1. Attempted battery (spec)   - Unlawful confinement- Unlawful confinement
- Bodily injury or        2. Reasonable apprehension      to bounded area     - Asportation required
  offensive touching         (general intent)           - Aware or harmed       (more than incidental)

1. Battery

• Definition: An unlawful application of force to the person of another resulting in either bodily injury or an offensive touching.
• Mental State: General intent. The defendant need not intend to cause injury or offense; it is sufficient that the defendant voluntarily performed the physical act with general criminal intent, reckless disregard, or criminal negligence.
• Application of Force: Force need not be applied directly or person-to-person. Indirect force fully satisfies battery (e.g., poisoning food, setting an attack dog loose, ordering a vehicle to accelerate into a victim, digging a pitfall trap).
• Offensive Touching: At common law, any unconsented physical contact with the victim's person or items intimately connected with their body (e.g., knocking a hat off someone's head, snatching a cane from their grip) constitutes battery.

2. Assault: The Two Distinct Common Law Branches

At common law, assault consists of two completely separate legal theories, which must be distinguished on the FYLSE:

Branch A: Attempted Battery Assault

• Rule: An attempt to commit a battery.
• Mental State: SPECIFIC INTENT. Because it is an attempt, the defendant must possess the specific intent to inflict physical injury or offensive contact.
• Victim Awareness: The victim's subjective awareness is IRRELEVANT. If Defendant creeps up behind Victim, swings an iron pipe at Victim's head, but misses while Victim is fast asleep, Defendant is guilty of attempted battery assault, even though Victim never knew of the attempt.

Branch B: Reasonable Apprehension Assault

• Rule: The intentional creation of a reasonable apprehension of imminent bodily harm in the victim.
• Mental State: GENERAL INTENT (intentional conduct directed at the victim).
• Victim Awareness: The victim MUST BE CONSCIOUSLY AWARE of the threat. If the victim does not perceive the threat, there is no apprehension, and this form of assault fails.
• Apprehension vs. Fear: Apprehension does not mean fear or terror; it means the anticipation or expectation of an imminent physical touching or battery. A professional heavyweight boxer can experience reasonable apprehension when a small assailant lunges with a knife, even if the boxer feels no subjective fear.
• Imminence & Words: Words alone are generally insufficient to constitute an assault. There must be an overt menacing physical gesture. Furthermore, words can negate an assault if they make the threat conditional on a future event or physically impossible (e.g., "If you were not an old man, I would strike you").

3. False Imprisonment

• Definition: The unlawful, intentional confinement or restraint of a person to a bounded area without valid consent.
• Mental State: General intent.
• Elements:
  1. An intentional act or omission resulting in confinement;
  2. Confinement to a bounded area (freedom of movement restricted in all directions);
  3. The confinement is unlawful and without consent;
  4. The victim must either be consciously aware of the confinement OR suffer actual physical harm from it.
• Reasonable Means of Escape: An area is not bounded if there is a reasonable, safe means of escape known to the victim. If escaping requires exposing oneself to serious danger (e.g., jumping from a third-story window) or humiliation (e.g., escaping unclad), the means of escape is unreasonable, and false imprisonment lies.

4. Kidnapping

• Definition: The unlawful confinement of a person accompanied by movement (asportation) or concealment in a secret place, accomplished by force, threat, or deception.
• The Asportation Requirement: At common law, kidnapping required carrying a person out of the country. Under modern penal codes, any unlawful movement satisfies kidnapping, provided the movement is more than merely incidental to an underlying crime.

[!IMPORTANT] The Incidental Movement Rule on the FYLSE: When an assailant commits a robbery or rape, the assailant almost invariably moves the victim slightly (e.g., forcing a bank teller into a back room, pushing a rape victim onto a bed, ordering a store clerk to walk three steps to the cash register). Such minor, incidental movements DO NOT CONSTITUTE KIDNAPPING. To sustain an independent kidnapping conviction alongside robbery or rape, the movement must:

1. Be substantial in distance; OR
2. Substantially increase the risk of physical harm to the victim over and above that inherent in the underlying crime (e.g., dragging the victim into a moving vehicle or into an isolated, remote structure).

5. False Arrest

The Content Map lists false arrest as its own item under crimes against the person, and it is simply false imprisonment carried out under a pretended or asserted claim of legal authority. The elements are identical — intentional confinement, without consent, without legal privilege — so the entire case turns on whether the arrest was privileged. Nothing else in the fact pattern matters if the privilege applies.

Three traps recur:

• A warrant valid on its face protects the arresting officer even if the warrant was later found to have issued improperly, because the officer is entitled to rely on the face of the process.
• A lawful arrest can become unlawful by what follows. Holding the arrestee for an unreasonable period without bringing them before a magistrate converts a privileged arrest into false imprisonment from that point forward.
• The officer's mistake rule does not transfer to private citizens. The single most commonly tested distinction in this area is that an officer's reasonable but mistaken belief that a felony occurred is protected, while a private citizen's identical mistake is not.

The tort analogue appears in the Torts material: a merchant who detains a suspected shoplifter is governed by the shopkeeper's privilege, which permits a detention that is reasonable in manner, duration, and grounds, and which fails on the same analysis when any of those limits is exceeded.