How long does a restraint have to last before it becomes the crime of false imprisonment? Pennsylvania’s false imprisonment statute does not say. It speaks instead of conduct that interferes “substantially” with another person’s liberty, and leaves the rest to the courts.
The Superior Court’s recent decision in Commonwealth v. Evans, 2026 PA Super 96 (May 12, 2026), confronts that question on facts that — to put it mildly — make the answer hard. A 45-year-old man approaches a 14-year-old girl on a mall escalator. He waits for her at the bottom, grabs her wrist, pins her arm against his body, and walks her 36 seconds through the mall while lying about his age and asking, after she tells him she is 13, whether he is too old for her. She eventually pulls free and runs. A jury convicts him of felony false imprisonment of a minor. He gets three-and-a-half to ten years and Tier I sex offender registration for fifteen years.
A divided Superior Court panel affirms. Judge Kunselman dissents. Both opinions are worth reading, and the dissent in particular deserves attention because it raises a real question about where the line sits between civil tort and felony crime.
The Statute and Its Comment
Pennsylvania’s false imprisonment statute is short. A person commits the offense “if he knowingly restrains another unlawfully so as to interfere substantially with his liberty.” 18 Pa.C.S. § 2903(a). When the victim is a minor and the offender is not the child’s parent, the offense becomes a felony of the second degree. 18 Pa.C.S. § 2903(b).
The key word — the word Evans turns on — is “substantially.” The General Assembly imported that language from Section 212.3 of the Model Penal Code, and the 1967 Joint State Government Commission Comment to the statute provides the only legislative gloss we have:
It is not intended by this section to penalize every detention which might be the basis of a civil suit for false imprisonment. For example, a short detention of a suspected thief by the victim for the purpose of questioning or recovering the stolen property would not constitute a crime under this section.
That Comment is central to this opinion, particularly in the dissent. It tells us two things. First, the criminal offense is meant to be narrower than the civil tort — which in Pennsylvania requires only an unlawful detention, with no separate “substantially” element. See Renk v. City of Pittsburgh, 641 A.2d 289, 293 (Pa. 1994). Second, the Comment offers a “short detention” as its paradigm example of conduct that should not be criminalized.
The case law fleshing out “substantially” is thin. The leading Superior Court case, In re M.G., 916 A.2d 1179 (Pa. Super. 2007), held that “substantially” carries its plain dictionary meaning: an “ample or considerable” interference with liberty. M.G. involved a 14-year-old delinquent who locked his 10-year-old cousin in her bedroom while she was wearing only a towel, sexually assaulted her for nearly two minutes, and was stopped only when her sister banged on the door. The court upheld the false imprisonment adjudication.
A handful of other cases — In the Interest of T.G., 836 A.2d 1003 (Pa. Super. 2003); Commonwealth v. Enders, 595 A.2d 600 (Pa. Super. 1991); Commonwealth v. Belgrave, 391 A.2d 662 (Pa. Super. 1978) — round out the analysis. They share two features. The victim is confined in an enclosed space (a bedroom, a barn, the backseat of a car). And the false imprisonment runs alongside other criminal conduct (sexual assault, ritualistic abuse, kidnapping-style transport).
The Facts in More Detail
The mall security footage and the girl’s own Snapchat recording give us a clearer factual record than most appellate decisions. On July 12, 2023, the 14-year-old was at the Willow Grove Mall with friends. She walked away from them to buy earrings on the first floor and took the escalator down. Evans, accompanied by another man, was about ten steps ahead of her. He looked back, called to her, and waved her over. She did not approach him.
When she reached the bottom of the escalator, Evans waited. He offered his right arm and told her to walk with him. The earring store was 180 degrees behind her. She did not turn toward it. Instead, she walked straight ahead — alongside Evans, with the other man trailing nearby. After a few seconds and roughly twelve steps, Evans reached over with his left hand, grabbed her wrist, and pinned her arm against his torso.
For the next 36 seconds, they walked through the mall arm-in-arm. The girl secretly began recording on Snapchat. She did not call out, did not struggle visibly, and did not alert any of the nearby shoppers. Evans told her his name was “Alex” and that he was 25 years old. He then loosened his grip. She pulled away and told him she was 13. He asked whether he was too old for her, re-extended his arm, and tried to get her to walk with him again. She yelled, stepped back, and eventually ran.
She reported the incident to mall security, who declined to call police. She left with her friends, waited at a Panera until her father picked her up, and the police were eventually called from home. The Commonwealth charged false imprisonment of a minor and two counts of summary harassment. After the false imprisonment conviction, the Commonwealth withdrew the harassment charges.
The Majority’s Holding
President Judge Emeritus Stevens, joined by Judge Dubow, affirms the conviction. On the duration question, the majority refuses to read a “minimum temporal threshold” into the statute. It draws heavily on two non-precedential decisions, Commonwealth v. Salgado-Ochoa, 321 A.3d 979 (Pa. Super. 2024), and Commonwealth v. Lima, 256 A.3d 47 (Pa. Super. 2021). Salgado-Ochoa affirmed a false imprisonment conviction based on a one-minute restraint in which an uncle blocked a seven-year-old niece’s exit from a bedroom and sexually exposed himself. Lima affirmed a criminal attempt false imprisonment conviction where a stranger approached a 13-year-old from behind on the street and grabbed her in a bear hug until she elbowed him and ran.
On the “passive victim” point — the fact that the girl walked along quietly rather than screaming for help — the majority says this:
[A] passive victim’s acquiescence caused by shock, confusion, or resignment, which the victim in the case sub judice articulated during her trial testimony, is not incompatible with a detention contemplated and proscribed in the crime of false imprisonment.
The majority adds that there is no “manifest legislative intent in Section 2903 to exclude from its protections those victims, often young victims, who silently retreat inward in response to adults’ commandeering and restraints instead of lashing out in defiance of such acts.”
On the Comment, the majority distinguishes the suspected-thief example. The thrust of the Comment involves a detention undertaken in apparent good faith and with an explanation. Evans’s restraint involved neither.
The majority also affirms on the jury instruction question — the trial court’s instruction tracked M.G. nearly verbatim — and on the discharged-juror issues, which I’ll return to below.
The Dissent
Judge Kunselman’s dissent takes the Comment seriously, and takes seriously the difference between the civil tort and the criminal offense. Her core point: the General Assembly drew a deliberate line. The civil tort of false imprisonment requires only an unlawful detention. The criminal offense requires that the detention “interfere substantially” with liberty. The word “substantially” is the line between the two, and it must mean something more than “detained.” Otherwise the criminal statute collapses into the civil tort, which the Comment expressly forbids.
Applying that frame, Judge Kunselman walks through the video evidence. The girl voluntarily walked twelve steps alongside Evans before he grabbed her wrist. Once he did, she did not visibly struggle, did not call out, did not alert nearby shoppers. The pair walked through a public mall. The restraint lasted 36 seconds, after which Evans voluntarily loosened his grip and let her go when she said her age. The episode was, in the girl’s own initial Snapchat caption, “weird, and that’s about it.”
The dissent then distinguishes every case the majority relies on. M.G. was a locked bedroom and a sexual assault. Salgado-Ochoa was a locked bedroom and an indecent exposure. Lima was a bear hug grab from behind on a street. T.G., Enders, and Belgrave all involved confinement in enclosed spaces alongside other crimes. None of them involves a brief, arm-in-arm walk through a public space with bystanders within feet.
Judge Kunselman’s harshest words are for the majority’s reliance on Salgado-Ochoa. She notes that Salgado-Ochoa is a non-precedential Anders decision that engaged in no statutory construction at all, did not apply M.G.‘s definition of “substantially,” and did not consider the Comment. She concludes that the case is unpersuasive when applied to facts that bear no resemblance to a seven-year-old trapped in a bedroom with a sexually offending uncle.
Her bottom line: Evans’s behavior was, in her words, “creepy” and “socially unacceptable and shocking.” It may well give rise to civil liability and may well satisfy other criminal statutes. It does not satisfy the elements of felony false imprisonment as the legislature defined them.
The Juror Issues
Two of Evans’s other claims deserve mention.
The first is the trial court’s removal of Juror No. 8 after she sent a note stating she “respectfully but forcefully no longer wishes to discuss the aspects of this case.” The court interviewed her in chambers — without counsel — and removed her, replacing her with an alternate. The newly constituted jury then convicted.
The line between a juror who is refusing to deliberate (which is grounds for removal) and a juror who has deliberated and reached an unshakeable position (which is not) is genuinely difficult. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s Spencer decision and its progeny make clear that a conviction coerced by improper pressure on a holdout juror cannot stand. Commonwealth v. Spencer, 275 A.2d 299 (Pa. 1971); Commonwealth v. Greer, 951 A.2d 346 (Pa. 2008). The trial court’s view here was that Juror No. 8’s refusal to discuss the case further — as opposed to refusal to change her mind — placed her on the wrong side of that line.
The majority defers to the trial court’s demeanor judgment, which is the conventional move. Whether the in-chambers exchange — which consisted of essentially three questions and one “yes” — actually established that the juror was refusing to deliberate (rather than having deliberated to a firm conclusion) is harder to say from the cold record. I am skeptical that a single-question interview can reliably distinguish between those two postures, and I think trial courts confronting this situation should err on the side of more questioning, not less. But the appellate standard of review gives the trial court enormous latitude here, and reversal on this issue was always unlikely.
The second is the ex parte nature of the in-chambers interview. Evans argued on appeal that excluding defense counsel from a critical-stage juror inquiry violated his Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The majority finds this issue waived because defense counsel’s contemporaneous objections were framed as objections to the decision to remove the jurorrather than to the procedure used to interview her. That is a defensible application of Pa.R.A.P. 302(a), but it is also a hard waiver to swallow on facts where the entire problem is that counsel could not object to what was happening inside the room because counsel was not in the room.
The lesson for trial practice is unforgiving: if a court announces it will conduct an ex parte juror interview, defense counsel must place on the record both the substantive objection (the juror should not be removed) and the procedural objection (counsel must be present for any such inquiry). The two are not the same, and one will not preserve the other.