Abstract
"25 Most whites simply turned a blind eye to kidnappings of a whole race of people in their back yard.26 By the late nineteenth century, enterprising criminals started to kidnap the children of rich white people and hold them hostage.27 These cases generated torrents of publicity and prompted the public and political officials to demand action, which usually involved reactionary legislative expansions of kidnapping's definition or punishment.28 Conversely, near silence occurred when large numbers of blacks were taken and even lynched.29 In many of these cases, the perpetrators of violence were part of the very establishment charged with enforcing kidnapping statutes.30 Over the next several decades, usually after the publicized kidnapping of a white child, states continued to incrementally broaden the offense.31 But the floodgates opened with the landmark kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby in 1932.32 The case and its extensive publicity sent federal and state governments on an emotionally charged quest to augment kidnapping's definition to such an extent that it came to encompass "a wide and ill-defined range of behavior" and now "elude [s] meaningful definition. When defendants have raised constitutional challenges to kidnapping statutes, the courts have remained sadly silent and have turned a blind eye-like they have in previous centuries-to these real problems.43 Time and again, courts have largely refused to give these constitutional provisions any remedial power.44 To this end, in Part II, I propose two simple solutions.45 First, legislatures should drastically restrict kidnapping ' s definition so that it no longer overlaps with so many other criminal offenses, like has been done with the Model Penal Code.46 The definition should make the offense unique again, requiring things like transportation a significant distance or hostage taking. [...]courts should be willing to strike down kidnapping statutes for vagueness, and for violating the Double Jeopardy, Cruel and Unusual Punishment, and Equal Protection Clauses. Because kidnapping has virtually no boundaries, prosecutors can improperly discriminate and defendants could never prove otherwise.