On March 1, 1932, Charles and Anne Lindberg's twenty-month-old baby boy was kidnapped out of his nursery while he slept. (1) Known for many years after as the "crime of the century," the kidnapping of the Lindberg baby was, at the time, highly sensationalized. (2) Not only did it involve Lindberg, the man who had flown solo across the Atlantic to become the age's "greatest hero," but the ransom demanded--fifty thousand Depression-era dollars--was considered by most Americans at the time to be a fortune. (3) Newspapers of the day covered the kidnapping with an intensity usually reserved for politics or war, and ordinary people deluged the Lindberg family with thousands of potential leads, expressions of sympathy, and psychic predictions. (4) Even the notorious gangster Al Capone got involved; he promised that if he were released from prison, he and his henchman would deliver both the missing child and the perpetrator. (5)
Despite the level of attention swirling around the missing Lindberg baby, authorities investigating the kidnapping found themselves hampered in their efforts by the nature of kidnapping laws. (6) At the time, the only kidnapping laws were state laws, and these often--conflicting state laws forced the authorities to conform an otherwise national manhunt to the particular idiosyncrasies of each state into which it extended. (7) To alleviate this confusion and facilitate the pursuit of kidnappers without regard to state lines, Congress quickly passed the Federal Kidnapping Act. (8) Designed exclusively to give federal authorities the power to chase kidnappers when they fled from one jurisdiction to another and from one state to another, the Act created a legal supplement to state kidnapping laws: a nationwide rule of illegality that could govern where a single state's law could not. (9)
Unfortunately, the Act could do little to help the missing Lindberg child. As a trucker discovered on May 12, 1932, the body of the baby had all the while been laying in the woods just a few miles from the Lindberg home, dead as the result of a skull fracture. (10) The Act had been irrelevant; the victim had not been carried across a county line, much less a state line. (11)
Nevertheless, the Act remained, and for the next fifty years it was employed with little controversy, used against those kidnappers that, during the course of the kidnapping, carded their victims across state lines. (12) Over the years, the Act performed the function for which it was designed: to give federal authorities the ability to chase kidnappers across jurisdictional lines and prosecute them under a single, federal criminal statute without becoming tangled in the mire of inconsistent state laws. (13)
Recently, however, in United States v. Wills, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit expanded the Act's traditional scope to reach kidnappings in which the kidnapper does not carry his victim across state lines. (14) In Wills, the court held that federal jurisdiction arises under the Act when a kidnapper uses false pretenses to lure his victim into crossing state lines, even if the kidnapper himself does not accompany the victim during that crossing. (15) As the Wills court noted, its holding was in direct opposition to United States v. McInnis, a twenty-year-old case from the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that held that federal jurisdiction under the Act can be established only when the kidnapper actually accompanies the victim across state lines. (16) The Act, the Fifth Circuit held in McInnis, does not "reach the entirely voluntary act of a victim in crossing a state line even though it is induced by deception." (17)
As this article will argue, the circuit split resulting from Wills is of some consequence. For if, as Wills holds, federal jurisdiction under the Act can attach even when a kidnapping does not cross state lines, then the constitutionality of the Act is brought into question. …
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