Definition
A person who has been placed under arrest. In modern usage, the term refers to any individual taken into custody by law enforcement pursuant to a lawful arrest — whether by warrant or warrantless arrest based on probable cause. The arrestee is the subject of the arrest, distinct from the arresting officer and from a person merely detained for investigative purposes short of formal arrest.
In Scots law, the term carries a distinct and older technical meaning: the person in whose hands the movable property of a debtor, or a debt owed to a debtor, has been seized by a creditor through the process of arrestment. In this context, the arrestee is not the person being accused or restrained, but rather a third-party custodian of funds or goods subject to a civil distraint procedure. This Scots law meaning is essentially obsolete outside of Scottish legal proceedings and historical sources.
Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): A person who is under arrest.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): The person in whose hands is the property attached by arrestment.
The divergence here is historically significant. Webster's 1913 reflects exclusively the Scots law technical sense — a third-party property holder subject to arrestment — while modern common usage has converged entirely on the criminal procedure sense. A researcher encountering "arrestee" in 19th-century British or Scottish sources must verify which meaning applies; the word does not mean the same thing across these contexts.
Common Confusion
ARRESTEE vs. DETAINEE: An arrestee has been formally placed under arrest, triggering full Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections (in U.S. law), including Miranda obligations. A detainee may be held on lesser grounds — such as a Terry stop or immigration hold — without the same procedural triggers attaching. The distinction matters enormously for suppression motions and civil rights claims.
ARRESTEE (modern) vs. ARRESTEE (Scots law): In historical legal dictionaries, "arrestee" consistently refers to the Scots law third-party custodian, not the person arrested in the criminal sense. Researchers using Bouvier's, Burrill's, or Black's first edition for this term will find definitions that bear no relationship to the modern criminal procedure meaning.
Why It Matters in Research
The primary research trap is temporal and jurisdictional: every major historical law dictionary in the Law Mind corpus — Black's (1st ed.), Bouvier's, Burrill's, and Black's (2nd ed.) — defines "arrestee" in its Scots law sense only. None of them define the term as it is used in modern American criminal procedure. A researcher relying on these sources alone would come away with a technically accurate but practically useless definition for any contemporary U.S. legal question.
The modern criminal procedure meaning of "arrestee" became prominent in constitutional litigation, particularly after the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment decisions addressing search incident to arrest, DNA collection from arrestees, and the rights that attach at the moment of custodial arrest. This body of doctrine does not appear in the historical dictionaries at all.
For corpus research, this means: if you encounter "arrestee" in a 19th or early 20th-century source, treat it as the Scots law term unless context clearly indicates otherwise. If you are researching modern criminal procedure, the historical dictionaries are simply the wrong starting point for this term and should be supplemented with statutory definitions (e.g., 34 U.S.C. § 40702, defining "arrestee" for DNA collection purposes) and case law.
Jurisdictional variation also matters in a second respect: state statutes and court rules sometimes define "arrestee" expressly for specific procedural purposes (bail, booking, diversion programs), and those definitions may be narrower or broader than the general common-law understanding.
Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries agree completely — and exclusively — on the Scots law meaning. Black's (1st ed.) and Burrill's both cite 2 Kames' Equity at 173–175 for the proposition that the arrestee is the person in whose hands another's movables or debt have been arrested by the creditor. Bouvier adds important procedural consequence: if the arrestee pays the common debtor in contempt of the arrestment, he is liable both criminally for breach and civilly to pay the debt again to the arrester — a point that clarifies why the role carried legal significance in Scots procedure.
Rapalje & Lawrence, whose excerpt appears under this heading, actually addresses the general law of arrest (what constitutes a valid arrest, when acquiescence suffices, whether a warrant must be produced) rather than the term "arrestee" itself. This is a useful caution: historical dictionary entries sometimes bleed across adjacent headwords, and the substantive content may address a related but distinct concept.
What the historical dictionaries collectively miss: the entire modern American constitutional dimension. The rights of the arrestee as against the state — Fourth Amendment protection from unreasonable searches incident to arrest, Fifth Amendment Miranda rights, Sixth Amendment right to counsel at critical stages — are absent from these sources entirely, not because the compilers were careless, but because these doctrines largely postdate the dictionaries or developed in a different legal tradition.
Jurisdictional Note
In U.S. federal law, "arrestee" appears in several statutory definitions with specific scope, including DNA database statutes and pretrial services provisions. State definitions vary. The Scots law meaning retains technical relevance in Scottish civil procedure but is otherwise of historical interest only in American and English legal research.