Wisconsin 940.30: False Imprisonment Penalties and Defenses

Wisconsin Statute 940.30 makes false imprisonment a Class H felony: intentionally confining or restraining another person, without their consent, when you know you have no lawful authority to do so.¹ A conviction carries up to six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000.² The statute itself is one sentence long, but the elements inside it do a lot of work.

What the State Has to Prove

Wisconsin’s pattern jury instructions break the statute into five elements, and the prosecution has to prove each one beyond a reasonable doubt.³

The defendant confined or restrained the victim, meaning they restricted the victim’s freedom of movement.
The defendant acted intentionally. Accidentally locking someone in a room is not a crime under this statute.
The victim did not consent. Agreement obtained through threats or deception does not count as consent.
The defendant knew the victim had not consented.
The defendant knew they had no lawful authority to confine or restrain the person.

That last element carries more weight than it looks like it does. Law enforcement officers, parents dealing with minor children, and merchants acting under the retail-theft statute all have claims to lawful authority in certain situations. If the defendant genuinely believed they had legal authority, the knowledge element fails, and the charge fails with it.

Confinement Doesn’t Require Walls

You do not need handcuffs, locked doors, or physical barriers to commit false imprisonment in Wisconsin. The jury instructions say directly that a person can be confined or restrained by acts, words, or both.³ If someone stays put because another person has threatened immediate violence should they try to leave, that is confinement. The threat is the barrier.

The instructions are also clear that consent given out of fear is not consent at all. If the alleged victim agreed to stay only because the defendant threatened immediate physical violence against them, a family member, or someone else present, the law treats it as restraint without consent.³ Many false imprisonment charges arise from exactly this pattern: one person using intimidation during an argument to keep the other from walking out the door.

Duration matters less than people assume. The question for the jury is whether the victim’s freedom of movement was actually restricted, not how long the restriction lasted. A few minutes of being blocked from leaving a room can support the charge if the other elements are there.

Penalties for a Conviction

As a Class H felony, false imprisonment carries a maximum of six years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, or both.² Wisconsin uses bifurcated sentencing, so that six-year ceiling is split into two phases: up to three years of initial confinement in a state correctional facility, followed by up to three years of extended supervision in the community.⁴

Extended supervision is structured release. You are out of prison, but the Department of Corrections monitors your compliance with court-ordered conditions. Violating those conditions can send you back for the remainder of the supervision term.

The sentence is not the end of it. A felony conviction costs you the right to vote while incarcerated and on supervision, complicates employment and professional licensing, and shows up on housing applications. A court can also order restitution to cover documented victim losses like medical or therapy bills, separate from any fine.

Domestic Abuse Enhancer

False imprisonment charges often come out of domestic situations where one partner physically blocks the other from leaving. Two things change when that happens. Wisconsin’s mandatory arrest law requires officers to arrest the predominant aggressor when they have reasonable grounds to believe domestic abuse involving a crime occurred and either continued abuse is likely or there is evidence of injury.⁵

If the defendant qualifies as a “domestic abuse repeater,” the maximum sentence goes up by two years, pushing total exposure from six to eight.⁶ A domestic abuse repeater is someone who either commits a new domestic abuse crime within 72 hours of a prior domestic abuse arrest or has two or more domestic abuse convictions in the last ten years.

Defenses to a 940.30 Charge

Consent

Genuine consent is a complete defense. If the person agreed to stay and the agreement was freely given, not pulled out of them through threats, force, or deception, no false imprisonment occurred. Proving what happened in a private setting is the hard part. Prosecutors will look at the relationship, any history of threats, and whether the alleged victim had a realistic ability to leave.

Lawful Authority

The statute only reaches people who know they lack lawful authority to detain. Law enforcement officers acting within their duties, court officers executing valid orders, and parents exercising reasonable control over minor children all have potential claims to lawful authority. The operative word is knowledge. If the defendant genuinely believed they had legal authority, the prosecution has to defeat that belief to satisfy the fifth element.

Shopkeeper’s Privilege

Wisconsin’s retail theft statute lets merchants, their adult employees, and their security agents detain a person suspected of shoplifting, but only under specific conditions. The merchant needs reasonable cause to believe the person committed theft in their presence, the detention has to happen at or within the business, and the manner and length of the detention have to be reasonable. The detained person must be told why they are being held and allowed to make phone calls. A merchant who stays within those limits has immunity from civil and criminal liability.⁷

Merchants lose the privilege when they go past those limits: holding someone unreasonably long, using excessive force, interrogating or searching the person against their will before police arrive, or detaining someone without genuine reasonable cause. Any of those steps outside the lines and the immunity is gone.

How This Differs From Kidnapping

False imprisonment is the lower-level confinement charge. Kidnapping under 940.31 is a Class C felony carrying up to 40 years, and the gap comes down to what the defendant intended and did.⁸ Kidnapping requires the state to prove the defendant used force, the threat of force, or deception with the intent to secretly confine the victim, carry them out of state, or hold them to forced labor. If the defendant also meant to extort property or ransom in exchange for release, the charge rises to a Class B felony with a 60-year maximum.²

Wisconsin also has a separate hostage-taking statute, 940.305, which applies when someone seizes or confines a person to use them as leverage to force a third party to act.⁹ Hostage taking is a Class B felony, dropping to Class C if the victim is released unharmed before arrest. False imprisonment is the charge when movement is restricted without any of these aggravating purposes. Add intent to secretly hold, transport, ransom, or leverage the victim, and the charge jumps.

Consequences Beyond the Sentence

Lifetime Firearms Ban

A false imprisonment conviction triggers a federal ban on possessing firearms and ammunition. Federal law bars anyone convicted of a crime punishable by more than one year in prison from shipping, transporting, receiving, or possessing any firearm or ammunition.¹⁰ A Class H felony clears that threshold easily. The ban applies regardless of the actual sentence imposed. Probation with no jail time still triggers it.

A Civil Lawsuit on Top of the Criminal Case

A criminal case does not prevent the victim from suing. Wisconsin courts have long recognized false imprisonment as a civil tort, defined as the unlawful restraint of another person’s physical liberty.¹¹ In civil court the victim can seek damages for lost freedom, emotional distress, fear, and humiliation, categories that criminal restitution does not reach. The civil burden of proof is lower too, a preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt, so a civil case can succeed even when the criminal case does not produce a conviction.

Statute of Limitations

Because false imprisonment is a felony, the state has six years from the date of the offense to begin prosecution.¹² Prosecution is “commenced” when a warrant or summons is issued, an indictment is found, or an information is filed, not when the arrest happens. If the six-year window closes without one of those steps, the charge is barred.

1
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Statutes 940.30 – False Imprisonment
2
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 939.50 – Classification of Felonies
3
Wisconsin Jury Instructions. Wisconsin Jury Instructions – 1275 False Imprisonment
4
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 973.01 – Bifurcated Sentence of Imprisonment and Extended Supervision
5
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 968.075 – Domestic Abuse Incidents
6
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 939.621 – Increased Penalty for Certain Domestic Abuse Offenses
7
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 943.50 – Retail Theft
8
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Statutes 940.31 – Kidnapping
9
Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 940.305 – Taking Hostages
10
Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 922 – Unlawful Acts
11
Justia Law. Strong v. Milwaukee – 1968 – Wisconsin Supreme Court Decisions
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Wisconsin State Legislature. Wisconsin Code 939.74 – Time Limitations on Prosecutions