Summary

In Austin v. State, 160 Me. 240D (1964), Rodney C. Austin had been convicted of three counts of kidnapping and, having had a previous conviction with imprisonment, was sentenced to life imprisonment. On appeal, Austin, through appointed counsel, argued that the indictment failed to allege “ransom or reward,” which he claimed was made an element of kidnapping under a 1935 amendment. The Law Court concluded that, while grammatically plausible, the legislature in 1935 didn’t mean to respond to the Lindbergh kidnapping publicity by narrowing rather than broadening the kidnapping statute. In reciting the first common-law, then statutory history of the crime of kidnapping, the Law Court cited State v. Rollins, 8 N. H. 550 (1837). In State v. Rollins, the indictment alleged that on October 24, 1836, the defendant assaulted, kidnapped, and sold Benjamin Swett, a free mixed-race boy under 10 years old, to Samuel Bennett for $50, and held him at the house of the buyer’s brother Jonathan Bennett with the intent to remove him to the South. Swett had been apprenticed to Rollins on February 24, 1835. Swett was rescued by the authorities of Exeter, who discovered that Rollins and Bennett had signed a $10,000 bond meant to secure Swett’s enslavement until age 21. The defendant, by counsel, cited Blackstone for the proposition that at English common law, kidnapping required an element of out-of-country travel, and claimed that there was no notice or authority for incorporating the crime of kidnapping into the common law of New Hampshire. Furthermore, Massachusetts (whose territory included New Hampshire at the time) expressly abolished common law as it applied to criminal matters, only binding its citizens to statutes enacted by its legislature. The state countered that first requiring the legislature or the courts to enumerate with specificity which common-law principles survived independence would be impractical. Besides Blackstone, many other treatises noted the existence of a crime of kidnapping at common law, and specified that neither force nor international travel is a necessary element; the only necessary element is a single step towards the unlawful purpose of coercive or deceptive transportation. The Court noted that James I’s original charter for New England, the commission for the government of the Province of New Hampshire, the general law of New Hampshire passed in 1777 upon independence, and the 1783 New Hampshire Constitution all expressly incorporated the English common law. To needlessly restrict the scope of the common law, leaving questions of its meaning, would be deeply impractical. Because, per the state’s sources, the common law recognized the criminal nature of a mere scheme to deceptively transport, Rollins committed a crime at common law. However, because the indictment specifically alleged (unnecessarily) additional elements of interstate travel and intention of the victim to be held in slavery, and the verdict only proved the (sufficient) element of taking steps to deceptively restrain the liberties of another person via travel, the indictment was not fully proved, and thus a new trial was needed.