Frisbie v. Collins
Based on Wikipedia: Frisbie v. Collins
The Kidnapping That Changed American Law
Imagine this: police officers from Michigan cross state lines into Illinois, grab a man off the streets of Chicago, and forcibly drag him back to Michigan to stand trial for murder. No warrant. No extradition process. Just brute force kidnapping by the very people sworn to uphold the law.
Surely this would invalidate any subsequent conviction, right? After all, the whole thing sounds like something out of a lawless frontier town, not mid-twentieth-century America.
Wrong.
In 1952, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Frisbie v. Collins that it was perfectly constitutional. Once you're physically present in a court's jurisdiction, it doesn't matter how you got there. The court can try you. Period. This principle, known as the Ker-Frisbie doctrine, remains good law today, and it has shaped everything from domestic kidnapping cases to international abductions that strain diplomatic relations.
Where This Story Really Begins: Peru, 1886
To understand Frisbie, we need to travel back sixty-six years to an even more dramatic case. Frederick M. Ker was an American citizen living in Peru, wanted back in the United States on charges of larceny and embezzlement. President Chester Arthur—yes, the one famous for his impressive mutton chops and civil service reform—sent an agent to Peru to negotiate Ker's extradition through proper diplomatic channels.
Extradition, for those unfamiliar with the term, is the formal legal process by which one country or state hands over a person accused of a crime to another jurisdiction. It involves paperwork, treaties, diplomatic coordination, and judicial review. It's slow, but it's how civilized nations are supposed to handle these matters.
The American agent had other ideas.
Rather than wait for the extradition paperwork to process, he simply kidnapped Ker and brought him back to face trial. Peru, for whatever reason, never formally protested this violation of its sovereignty. Ker, however, argued to the Supreme Court that his abduction was illegal and should void any trial.
The Court disagreed. Writing in Ker v. Illinois, the justices established what would become a cornerstone principle: "such forcible abduction is no sufficient reason why the party should not answer when brought within the jurisdiction of the court which has the right to try him for such an offense and presents no valid objection to his trial in such court."
In plain English: we don't care how you got here. You're here now, and you'll face justice.
Shirley Collins and the Michigan Kidnapping
Fast forward to the late 1940s. Shirley Collins—a man, despite the name that might suggest otherwise to modern readers—was living in Chicago when Michigan authorities decided they wanted him for murder. Rather than go through the formal process of interstate extradition, which would have required cooperation from Illinois officials, they simply crossed state lines and took him.
Collins found himself convicted of murder and serving a life sentence in a Michigan prison. From his cell, he filed what's called a habeas corpus petition. Habeas corpus is Latin for "you shall have the body," and it's one of the oldest and most fundamental protections in Anglo-American law. It allows a prisoner to challenge the legality of their detention before a court.
Collins had two main arguments. First, he claimed his kidnapping violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which guarantees due process of law—the idea that the government can't deprive you of life, liberty, or property without following proper legal procedures. Second, and more creatively, he pointed to the Federal Kidnapping Act.
The Federal Kidnapping Act Twist
The Federal Kidnapping Act of 1932 made it a serious federal crime to transport any person across state lines against their will. The law was famously passed in response to the Lindbergh baby kidnapping—the abduction and murder of the infant son of aviator Charles Lindbergh, which shocked the nation. The statute imposed severe penalties: imprisonment for a term of years, life imprisonment, or in some circumstances, death.
Collins's argument was elegant. Congress had declared that kidnapping someone across state lines was such a serious offense that it warranted the death penalty. How, then, could courts continue to accept the fruits of such kidnappings when committed by police officers? The Court of Appeals agreed with this reasoning, holding that the Federal Kidnapping Act had fundamentally changed the rules.
The Supreme Court saw it differently.
Justice Black and the Reaffirmation
Justice Hugo Black delivered the opinion of the Court, and he wasn't buying the argument. Black reasoned that the very severity of the penalties under the Kidnapping Act made it implausible that Congress had intended them to apply to law enforcement officers. The statute was aimed at criminals, not cops.
This might strike modern readers as odd logic. If the law says kidnapping across state lines is a crime, why should police be exempt? But Black's reasoning reflected a certain pragmatism—and perhaps a certain deference to law enforcement—that characterized mid-century jurisprudence. Courts were reluctant to impose obstacles on police pursuing criminals, even when those obstacles were laws that Congress had enacted.
The Court reaffirmed the Ker principle: forcible abduction into a jurisdiction does not impair the power of that jurisdiction's courts to try the person for a crime. Your presence is what matters, not how that presence came to be.
The Doctrine's Long Shadow
Frisbie v. Collins didn't just settle one case. It established a principle that continues to echo through American law. The Supreme Court has cited it thirteen times in subsequent cases, often in situations involving tricky questions about jurisdiction and the validity of arrests.
The doctrine became especially important in cases where evidence was obtained as a result of illegal arrests. Under the exclusionary rule—which bars prosecutors from using evidence obtained through unconstitutional searches and seizures—one might think that anything flowing from an illegal arrest would be "fruit of the poisonous tree" and therefore inadmissible.
But the Ker-Frisbie doctrine creates a crucial exception. Even if your arrest was completely illegal, you can still be tried. And while certain evidence obtained during that illegal arrest might be suppressed, your physical presence in court—and your face, your identity—cannot be excluded.
The Face in the Courtroom
This principle was tested directly in United States v. Crews, a 1980 case that illustrated just how far the doctrine extends. The facts were these: a defendant had been illegally arrested, and during that arrest, police took his photograph. They showed this photo to an assault victim, who identified him as her attacker. She later picked him out of a lineup and again identified him in the courtroom.
The trial court ruled the arrest illegal and suppressed both the photograph and the lineup identification. But what about the courtroom identification? Could the victim point at the defendant sitting at the defense table and say, "That's him"?
Justice Byron White, joined by Chief Justice Warren Burger and Justice William Rehnquist, addressed this question directly. His answer was unequivocal: a defendant's face can never be suppressed as the fruit of an illegal arrest. Why? Because "the fact that respondent was present at trial and therefore capable of being identified by the victim is merely the inevitable result of the trial being held, which is permissible under Frisbie."
Think about what this means. Even if police kidnapped you, violated every constitutional protection, and dragged you before a court through sheer lawlessness, the court could still try you, and witnesses could still point at your face and identify you. Your very identity, your physical being, is not suppressible evidence.
Crossing International Borders: The Alvarez-Machain Affair
The most consequential application of the Ker-Frisbie doctrine came in 1992, in a case that created an international incident and strained relations with one of America's closest neighbors.
Humberto Alvarez-Machain was a Mexican citizen, a doctor, who was accused of participating in the torture and murder of a Drug Enforcement Administration agent. The United States wanted him badly. But rather than go through the formal extradition process laid out in the 1978 treaty between the United States and Mexico, American agents arranged to have him kidnapped from Mexican soil and brought to the United States for trial.
Mexico was furious. Unlike Peru in the Ker case, Mexico loudly protested this violation of its territorial sovereignty and demanded Alvarez-Machain's return. The case presented a question the Supreme Court had not directly addressed: did the Ker-Frisbie doctrine apply even when the abduction violated a formal extradition treaty?
The majority said yes. A defendant has no personal rights under an extradition treaty; only the countries that signed it do. If Mexico wanted to protest, that was a matter for diplomats, not courts. Alvarez-Machain could be tried.
Justice John Paul Stevens wrote a blistering dissent, joined by Justices Harry Blackmun and Sandra Day O'Connor. Stevens argued that when the government had explicitly promised in a treaty to follow certain procedures, courts should not permit the government to evade those promises through forcible abduction. "It is clear that Mexico's demand must be honored if this official abduction violated the 1978 Extradition Treaty between the United States and Mexico," he wrote.
The majority disagreed. The treaty, they held, did not expressly prohibit abductions. Its silence on the question meant that abductions were permitted, or at least that courts would not inquire into them.
What Does This Mean for Justice?
The Ker-Frisbie doctrine raises profound questions about the nature of justice and the rule of law. On one hand, there's an appealing pragmatism to it. Criminals shouldn't escape justice simply because the police who caught them broke some rules along the way. The focus should be on guilt or innocence, not procedural technicalities.
On the other hand, the doctrine seems to create a perverse incentive. If courts will accept defendants no matter how they're obtained, what stops police from routinely ignoring legal procedures? The majority in Frisbie suggested that the criminal penalties under the Kidnapping Act would deter law enforcement from engaging in such conduct. But in practice, how often are police officers prosecuted for kidnapping suspects?
There's also a troubling asymmetry. Ordinary citizens who kidnap others face severe punishment. Police officers who do the same thing in the course of their duties face, at most, mild professional discipline—and they accomplish their goal of bringing the suspect to trial. The law punishes the method but rewards the result.
The Doctrine in Context
It's worth noting that the Ker-Frisbie doctrine operates alongside other constitutional protections, not in place of them. Defendants who have been illegally arrested still have rights. Evidence obtained during an unconstitutional search can still be suppressed. Confessions coerced through violence or deception can be excluded. The Constitution still provides protections; it just doesn't provide the protection of dismissing charges because of how you were brought before the court.
The doctrine also doesn't prevent diplomatic consequences. When the United States kidnaps someone from Mexico or Peru or any other country, that country can protest, withdraw cooperation, or take other diplomatic measures. The Alvarez-Machain case, for instance, created years of friction between the United States and Mexico and made future cooperation on drug enforcement more difficult. Courts may not care how a defendant arrived, but foreign governments certainly do.
Living with Ker-Frisbie
More than seventy years after Frisbie v. Collins, the doctrine it reaffirmed continues to shape American law. Every time a defendant argues that an illegal arrest should void their conviction, prosecutors cite Frisbie. Every time international law scholars debate the legality of transborder abductions, they must grapple with Ker.
The doctrine reflects a particular vision of criminal justice—one that prioritizes results over process, that focuses on the guilt of defendants rather than the conduct of police, that trusts law enforcement to police itself rather than requiring courts to enforce constitutional limits through exclusionary remedies.
Whether that vision is correct is a question that continues to divide courts, scholars, and citizens. What's undeniable is that it remains the law. If you're kidnapped by police and dragged across state lines or international borders, you can still be convicted of whatever crime they want to charge you with.
The court's doors are open to you, whether you walked through them willingly or not.