First Name:

Last Name:

Telephone:

Email:

Address:

City:

State:

Zipcode:

Incident Details:

form base
Home » Areas of Practice » Labor Laws

False Imprisonment

False Imprionment| Attorneys for Orlando, Tampa, Fort Myers, Jacksonville and Miami

If an employee holds another employee against their will in such a way that the confined individual’s right to be free of restraint is violated, this is known as false imprisonment. False imprisonment usually is accomplished through the use of brute force, but this sort of physicality is not a necessity. Simply the threat of force or arrest, or giving someone reason to believe that force is going to be used will suffice. Aside from physical force, a person can be confined through the use of barricades or by way of coercion.

For example, consider a situation in which an employee has been detained by management at the end of the workday for questioning about a laptop computer that has come up missing. If the supervisor insinuates that the employee could be arrested for trying to exit the building, the employee may have reason to believe that they are being held against their will even if no aggression or physical barriers are being utilized. Contingent upon the context of the case, the employee could file a lawsuit for false imprisonment.

To seek damages for false imprisonment, the claimant must have been imprisoned to a certain extent, and they must’ve been completely restricted from leaving a confined space. False imprisonment is not to be confused with the impediment of someone’s freedom of choice to go wherever they please. For instance, say Bill enters a room, and Mary blocks one exit so that he can’t leave through there, but she does not block the other. Bill obviously has the freedom to use the other doorway, and he has not been falsely imprisoned. Likewise, an unintentional confinement such as getting locked in a closet does not represent an act of false imprisonment either. In order for the latter example to be false imprisonment, the person responsible for the confinement must have done it deliberately.