In Florida, if you are caught with stolen property. But didn&#39;t steal the property, can you be charged? Lets say you are walking around your neighborhood and you find a golf cart in the middle of the road with the keys in it. You get curious to see if you can find something with the owners info on it and sit down to look through the cart. As you are looking around while sitting in the cart, the Police roll up and find you in the cart and it turns out it is stolen. Can you be charged for theft of the item, even thou you didn't steal it?
They can charge you with anything they think you did. And yes, the circumstances play a large part in the decision to arrest, charge and prosecute. However, circumstances include you: Reputation is everything. If you are a 17 year old male troublemaker with a long juvie rap sheet, including 3 past instances of stealing golf carts, then expect to be charged with the theft. Honestly you would probably be charged with the theft if you had simply stayed away and called the cops to report it abandoned. If you came upon it in your vehicle and it's obviously blocking the road and your apparent motive is to figure out how to move it so you can get by, then you're probably in the clear. If you're a 44 year old owner of a golf cart business, PAL supporter, city councilwoman and know half the cops including one in the car that stopped you, then, they're going to pretty much listen to you as far as what's the deal with the cart. Probably ask you for help moving it safely, might even ask you to get your cart-hauler to take it to impound. You won't hear from the D.A. obviously; nobody will say "Sue Councilwoman stole a golf cart" because it would sound absurd and make the speaker appear to be a politically motivated liar. That's the power of reputation; no one would speak it even if you did steal it. (Of course if you got caught doing it on a Ring camera, well, the hero takes a fall!) Anything in between, they'll deal with it in proportion to both the facts about you and the fact about the situation. You do not have a right to get the same credibility as the councilwoman; that is earned. That's the power of reputation.
Until it was found to be unconstitutional, Florida had a law against surcharges for using a credit card (the statute is still on the books, however). That was the only law against &quot;convenience fees&quot; related to making payments. Whether or not a business will accept a particular form of payment (check, credit card, money order, traveler's check, cash) is up to business. Apart from credit cards, there has been no law against charging for accepting a particular form of payment, but that charge would have to be part of the contract – the lease would have to specify in advance what the processing fee is for money orders vs. cash vs. credit card. The residential tenancies law of Florida does not prohibit incorporating fees into the terms of a lease (as some states do), so the lease can specify &quot;$1500 for rent plus $10 for payment-processing, every month&quot;.
It might be illegal, depending on where you are. If it is known to the person who owns the vehicle occupying your space prior to doing so that wheelclamping may be the result, then the common law doctrine of volenti non fit injuria ("to a willing party, harm is not done") would lead to a conclusion that one who knowingly places themselves in a situation where harm may befall them is not entitled to bring a claim of tort against the other party (in the United States assumption of risk is a similar doctrine, but doesn't apply here because wheelclamping is an intentional act). In your situation, this means that the owner occupying your space cannot bring a case in tort against you. While it is generally applied to harm to people, there is precedent (albeit in British case law) for the doctrine to be applied to vehicles, and specifically, to the situation you describe - see Arthur v Anker and Vine v London Borough of Waltham Forest. While cases from other jurisdictions are not binding, I have not been able to find any similar cases in the United States, and so it is possible that such cases will be persuasive. Note that this is highly jurisdiction-specific, and there may be laws in your state that make it unlawful - at least one high-profile case involving a McDonalds and its parking lot operator cites California law authorising only law enforcement to impound vehicles, and considering wheelclamping such an act. However, I have not been able to find the record of a judgement on this matter. It is also likely that if the payment you request is excessive, the owner would be able to seek relief, in the form of reducing the payment owed to a reasonable amount. However, if the parking space was not marked in some way to signal that it was reserved for use, then the owner of the vehicle may be entitled to seek injunctive relief and damages from a court. This would be on the basis of, if you only wheelclamped the car and declined to remove the wheelclamp upon the owner's request, the tort of detinue. But, if you attempted to request payment from them, then as Dale mentioned in his answer, you have committed extortion (wheelclamping is actually listed as a crime of extortion).
An officer is allowed to pull you over for speeding and then decline to give you a ticket for speeding. So the lack of a ticket has nothing to do with it (unless you actually weren't speeding, not even 1 MPH over.) Simply having past felonies, however, is not a reason for an officer to be able to search the car. Without a warrant, he'd need probable cause, consent, or some other exception to the warrant requirement. It's impossible for me to say what happened here. Maybe your husband had an outstanding arrest warrant? Maybe the officer saw the gun from outside the car? Maybe one of you said "OK" when he asked to search the car? Or maybe the search was illegal after all?
You give no jurisdiction but in general: First, police have no obligation to be honest. So, yes they can collect this without consent by e.g. taking hair from your hairbrush (with a warrant) or giving you a glass of water while interviewing you and getting it from your fingerprint oils (which may not actually be technically possible but never mind that). No, they can't take it by "force" by sticking a swab in your mouth. Yes, it will almost certainly go into a database. Of course, there are some jurisdictions where police are entitled to decide you are guilty based on the fact that you didn't pay them a bribe.
Presumably, they at least took a report which could make it possible to file an insurance claim for the stolen phone. But, a good faith belief of law enforcement that is unable to figure out who committed the crime with the resources available to them is a legitimate reason not to investigate and prosecute a crime, even in countries with legal systems based upon the German one where prosecutors have an enforceable legal obligation to prosecute criminal offenses known to them. A prosecutor can't bring a case unless he knows who did it. And, the police may be wise not to try to investigate a crime that previous experience has proven to them is a dead end most of the time for a crime of modest economic value. Most cases of simple larceny are never solved. And, institutionally, the police have to balance the cost of investigating the crime against the seriousness of the crime. Murders and kidnappings are almost always going to take priority for police resources over stolen phones, particularly if investigating the phone theft may require international cooperation that makes the investigation more costly. A key point is that the mere fact that a phone is pawned doesn't mean that the person pawning it is necessarily committing a crime, so even if you find out where the phone is in some pawn shop (possibly in Albania or Turkey, by now), that doesn't mean that the job is over. That person could have bought it innocently and at fair market value from a flea market, from someone who could have gotten it from someone who received it innocently as a gift, from a friend of a criminal fence, who may have bought it not innocently from a true thief. In fact, because criminals respond to incentives like anyone else, it is far more likely that the phone was swiftly "laundered" along the lines I suggest in this example, than it is that it is still in the possession of someone close to the thief. But, only the fence and the thief would have criminal liability. It is a lot harder to solve the crime of a stolen cell phone than you would think, and the agency may simply not be able to justify the resources it would take to investigate that case properly to a situation where someone had a phone stole that was worth maybe 400 Euros in used condition. The more you can do to solve the crime, the more likely it is that they will find that it is worth further investigating until a thief can be identified and apprehended. For example, the company with the network that serves the phone might be willing to cooperate with its owner. Also, the more that you can do to show that this case might crack an entire ring of people involved in a black market in stolen cell phones might make it more attractive to law enforcement.
You certainly can't legally steal anything, ever. If it is legal, it is not stealing. In particular, if it is your property, it isn't stealing. The question is really, "is it your property"? This will be jurisdiction dependant. I am familiar with England and Wales, and other common law jurisdictions may be similar. The fact you co-signed for the car definitely does not make it your property. It just means that out of the goodness of your heart, you agreed to reduce the finance company's risk by promising to pay if your ex-friend didn't. In E&amp;W, I don't think it is possible to register a car jointly, but there is a long page explaining that the registered keeper is not necessarily the owner of the car. My guess is that the car probably does not belong to you, so if you take it you will probably end up with a conviction for theft.
No. Your evidence of registration of the car would suffice to show that you are not receiving stolen property, although you are correct that not informing the police that it has been recovered could get you pulled over if the car has been reported as stolen. Given the circumstances of the question, I don't address the means by which the car is repossessed. Not every use of force would be justified to secure the return of the stolen car. Reporting the theft and recover to the police would also make it easier for you to make an insurance claim. Repossession of a car stolen by fraud (tricking you into signing over the car title to them in exchange for Monopoly money in an envelope that you don't check until after they are gone, or for a forged check), which is then sold to a bona fide third party individual for value, however, might constitute car theft.