In People v. Weiss (276 NY 384 [1938]) Weiss was an associate of Ellis Parker, the most famous police detective in America. Parker believed he was hot on the trail of the real kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby. Parker recruited the defendants to arrest a Paul H. Wendel in Brooklyn and bring him back to Parker in New Jersey where they intended to extract a confession from Wendel. To insulate the defendants from kidnapping charges, Parker "deputized" them as law officers. His deputation did not hold up in New York but the defendants tried to introduce evidence at trial of their ersatz deputy status as a mistake-of-fact defense to the "without authority of law" element of kidnapping. The court disallowed the evidence. The Appellate Division agreed (252 App Div 463) but the Court of Appeals held that the defendants should have had the chance to establish that they had a good faith belief that they were acting with lawful authority.