20 Historical Figures Arrested for Absurd Reasons

Socrates was put on trial in Athens in 399 B.C. for impiety and for allegedly corrupting the youth—a serious charge for someone who spent most of his time asking questions. But that didn’t matter at the time; the jury found him guilty, and he was sentenced to death by hemlock poisoning. 

Today, women love to wear nice pants, but in the 15th century, you could literally be arrested for doing so. Admittedly, Joan of Arc’s trial was based on a whole series of religious and political charges, but the legal grounds cited to justify her execution stemmed simply from the fact that she had resumed wearing men’s clothing after agreeing to stop doing so. 

Galileo was tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 for defending the idea that the Earth revolves around the Sun. An idea that is by no means radical by today’s standards, but the Church deemed him “strongly suspected of heresy,” banned his book, and kept him under house arrest for the rest of his life. 

In 1476, Leonardo da Vinci was accused of sodomy in Florence following an anonymous complaint against him and three other young men. The case, however, came to nothing; it was dismissed for lack of supporting witnesses, even though such an accusation could have led to severe penalties at the time. 

That’s quite a compliment. Voltaire’s satirical attacks on politics and religion so infuriated the French government that he was eventually arrested in 1717. However, although he spent nearly a year in the Bastille, this punishment did not really silence him, and the authorities unwittingly turned him into an even more determined figure of the Enlightenment.

You’ve probably heard this name before, but did you know that Casanova was arrested in Venice in 1755? He was officially charged with “offenses against religion and public morals,” a wonderfully vague charge that landed him five years in prison at the Doge’s Palace, without a proper trial or a clear explanation of the evidence against him. (But don’t worry: he escaped by climbing across the rooftops and turned this arrest into part of his legend.)

The Marquis de Sade was arrested on several occasions—and, to be fair to the 19th century, for crimes that would also warrant arrest today—primarily on charges of sexual abuse and poisoning. He was also arrested for a night that was, to say the least, insane and highly blasphemous, spent with a woman of easy virtue, Jeanne Testard. Some of the charges were dropped or reduced, but his behavior and writings continually landed him back in prison and in asylums. 

Long before Robinson Crusoe became a classroom staple, Daniel Defoe was convicted of seditious libel after publishing The Shortest Way with the Dissenters. In short, this pamphlet was satirical, but the authorities did not take kindly to it, and he was pilloried in 1703.

It’s not really surprising that men like Fyodor Dostoevsky caused a stir; in 1849, he was arrested for his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle, a group that discussed utopian socialism and reforms. He was imprisoned, sentenced to death, and subjected to a mock execution before being sent to Siberia. 

Duels were commonplace at the time, and people took them very seriously. Just ask the playwright Ben Jonson, who was arrested after killing the actor Gabriel Spencer in a duel in Shoreditch in 1598. He escaped the gallows by invoking ecclesiastical privilege, but he was still branded on the thumb and lost his property. 

Before Don Quixote made him immortal, Miguel de Cervantes worked as a tax collector, and it was irregularities in his accounts that landed him in the royal prison in Seville in 1597. The charges involved public funds and accounting irregularities—something that was almost inevitable given that his life was entangled in the intricacies of bureaucracy.

Oscar Wilde was arrested in 1895 and charged with gross indecency with another young man. Although he could have fled the country, he chose to stay and stand trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty allowed at the time: two years of hard labor.

Gandhi was arrested and tried for sedition in 1922 because of articles published in Young India. The British authorities claimed that these articles stirred up discontent toward the government; Gandhi therefore pleaded guilty, not because he recognized the legitimacy of the court, but because he openly accepted responsibility for his resistance to colonial rule. 

Susan B. Anthony had to endure many hardships to make her point, and no one could blame her for that. In 1872, she was arrested, indicted, tried, and convicted during the presidential election in Rochester, New York. Her “crime”? Voting illegally at a time when women did not have the right to vote in federal elections.

Bertrand Russell was imprisoned at Brixton Prison in 1918 because of his anti-war activism during World War I. His so-called crime was related to his public opposition to World War I, particularly an article suggesting that American soldiers might be used to break strikes in Great Britain. He was convicted under wartime laws, sent to Brixton Prison, and served about six months there. Once all that was over, he remained a leading pacifist, writer, and critic of state power.

Alice Paul had no intention of letting the law dictate to her and the other suffragists what they were or were not allowed to do. During their protests, they were eventually arrested while picketing in front of the White House to demand women’s right to vote. The official charge was often “obstructing traffic,” even though many of them were simply standing there holding banners. 

On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for violating Alabama’s barbaric bus segregation law by refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger. Despite the public outcry, her arrest sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, one of the defining campaigns of the civil rights movement. 

Parks wasn’t the only one fighting for her rights. In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. was also imprisoned in Alabama during protests against segregation. He was charged with “marching without a permit,” and from his jail cell, King wrote one of the most famous pleas for civil disobedience in U.S. history.

You may already know that Nelson Mandela was arrested (and later convicted) in 1962 for leaving South Africa without a valid passport. However, he was also charged with inciting workers to go on strike; at the time, he was engaged in underground activism against apartheid and was seeking to rally support for the anti-apartheid struggle. 

Eugene V. Debs was prosecuted under the Espionage Act after delivering an anti-war speech in Canton, Ohio, in 1918. This case resulted in a ten-year prison sentence, but that did not stop him from campaigning for the presidency from his prison cell in 1920, which earned him nearly a million votes.