In The Leftovers S01E02, one officer tells another while describing a criminal:
We had him on 8 counts of statuary in Pelsinvania but he got away in April.
As I understand the sentence, she means to say the criminal was arrested by 8 statuary officers and jailed but escaped in April, right?
The corrected line is as follows:
Yeah, the only catch is he needs to, um, charge his batteries with teenage girls; Asian ones, apparently… We had him on 8 counts of statutory in Pennsylvania, but he went underground in April.
Statutory is short for statutory rape, a legal term in some jurisdictions referring to sexual activity where one participant is below the age legally required to consent to sexual contact. (The legal treatment is rather more complicated, but this fact is not a central plot point, nor from what I can tell does the show strive for perfect accuracy in legal matters.)
Law enforcement had "Holy Wayne," the character they are speaking of, in the sense that they maintained an advantage over him. One may infer that they had collected enough evidence or testimony to charge him with 8 cases of statutory rape in Pennsylvania.
Before they could apprehend them, however, he went underground in the sense of going into hiding, especially from the police or other authorities.
If he had been arrested by the police, they would not have said he had gone underground. If he were in jail, he would have simply escaped; if he had been released on bail, he would have jumped bail.
Probably eight counts of statutory ? As in: We (the law) had him (caught and charged him with) 8 counts (eight separate instances of) statutory (statutory rape - i.e. sexual intercourse with a child) in Pennsylvania (in the state of P.) but he got away in April (he either was acquitted by a court/judge, or crossed state lines to escape punishment, or found a legal loophole like marrying the victim in the month of April)
