What would happen if you staged or hoaxed the commission of a crime? This was inspired by the title of the following: In a state with the common law definition of theft, can you force a store to take cash by &quot;pretending&quot; to steal? but in this situation, we make the crime actually pretend. Suppose you are good at sleight of hand, i.e. dextrous illusion-making like a magician. Using a product or good you actually own that looks to an outsider's eyes just like one in the store, but which you've marked in a discreet place so you are assured you don't accidentally actually take the one that isn't yours, and using your magician skills, you make it look like you were pocketing the wares when you actually didn't. To security, and to the limited resolution on a surveillance camera, it looks like a theft, and the police are called. What happens? Even if the illusionary nature is eventually discovered and proven (e.g. if the store keeps suitable inventory records which they can cross-check with transaction logs and they do and find that no items are unaccounted for), does the mere fact of having &quot;hoaxed&quot; the crime itself constitute some kind of crime in at least the same common-law jurisdictions? Could you be charged with something oblique like &quot;wasting police time&quot; or something? Could someone be charged with that? Even if none of that, would you still stand a strong chance to be successfully convicted of theft directly (albeit de facto wrongfully, but still), because someone could always claim you switched the items and it'd be your word against theirs that that mark was on the one you owned and not the one you didn't, and the injustices of unequal bargaining power would work against you?
I can’t think of any laws against pretending to commit a crime, per se. For example, undercover police officers often pretend to buy or sell illicit goods, to see who will take them up on the offer. However, pretending to commit some crimes could be a crime. if you intentionally pretend to be violent or unstable, and this “puts another person in reasonable apprehension of imminent harmful or offensive contact,” that could be common assault.
No, filing a police report in good faith does not expose you to liability Of course, making false allegations or allegations where you are recklessly indifferent to the truth to police is both a serious crime in itself and defamation. Of course, breaking a contract is not a crime and the police are unlikely to take any action. If you borrow money from the bank and don’t pay it back, that’s not stealing or fraud unless it can be proven that you had no intention of paying it back when you borrowed it. This is a civil matter for the bank, not a criminal matter for the police.
I am just a foreign patent attorney who is studying common law to pass the California Bar Exam, but I will present my personal view. (I cannot guarantee the validity of my theory) There is an equitable theory called Constructive Trust. If it is established, the victim is entitled to benefit of any increase in value of defendant's (thief) property, meaning in this example victim (plaintiff) can recover $100 million. In order to assert CT, the following must be met: Wrongful appropriation; Here, D stole lottery ticket. Met. D has title; Here, D has title to $100 million. Met. P can trace his property to D's property; P can trace from P's $1 lottery ticket to its possession by D and collection by D of $100 million. Met. Unjust enrichment by D; D was enriched by stealing P's property (the lottery ticket). Met. Thus, it is highly possible that a court will order D to hold the property ($100 million) in constructive trust for P. This means, in plain language, that P will recover $100 million.
Fraud may be a crime, or a tort (civil wrong): only criminal fraud can be a &quot;felony&quot;. The Washington criminal laws about fraud are here, and they are all fairly specific, such as selling or destroying encumbered property (which is a misdemeanor anyhow), or conducting a mock auction. Most frauds are misdemeanors, though forgeries are in the felony category. It also includes identity thefts, again the emphasis being on false documents. Based on your description, this is not a crime, it is a civil wrong, meaning that she will have to sue the guy to get her money back. The Attorney General's office will not get involved unless there is a widespread state interest (for example, very many Washington residents being victimized), and then the involvement would be suing on behalf of the victims. That said, if the swindle was carried out by phone, then that is potentially a violation of a federal felony law, 18 USC 1343. It would not matter if the parties are in the same state, because phone service counts as &quot;interstate commerce&quot;. So the details of phone involvement matter. Saying that you &quot;have to&quot; charge for processing a refund is not per se fraudulent and texting someone that &quot;I'll have to charge an extra $2,000&quot; doesn't make this wire fraud. But there is some potential for a federal wire fraud angle.
There is a relevant law, Title 18 section 907 which states that "A person commits a misdemeanor of the first degree if he possesses any instrument of crime with intent to employ it criminally". So possession of lock picks is not a crime per se. In Com. v. Gendrachi 389 A.2d 604 we are reminded that "intent need not be directly proved, but may be inferred from the circumstances surrounding the incident out of which the charges arise". The accused was busted in mildly suspicious circumstances at 5:20 am in the dead of winter, urinating. The court notes that "There is no evidence that appellant's hands were on the door or that he made an attempt to extract the tools from his pocket and apply them to the door. In fact, there is no act or statement by appellant that would lead one to infer that he intended to use the tools at that time", and that "appellant is a certified locksmith and it is not unreasonable to find the tools of his trade in his pocket, especially when he is wearing his work attire". Note that this is on appeal: he was convicted initially. The point is that there is a lot of slop in cashing out the legal concept of "intent". Pennsylvania does not, apparently, have any specific laws that refer to lock picks. It does have a statute that addresses having criminal tools, which are defined as (including) "Anything used for criminal purposes and possessed by the actor under circumstances not manifestly appropriate for lawful uses it may have". Mr. Gendrachi had those very tools, and the appeals court did not say anything to suggest that the tools were not "criminal tools" (and in FN 5 they actually point out that the Commonwealth cannot say that the tools were weapons, a ludicrous proposition never raised by anyone – so by failing to deny that lock picks are criminal tools, they are adoptively admitting that they are criminal tools). Thus I conclude that there is a law in PA, that lock picks are burglary tools, and that the government would have to prove intent to use criminally.
Exactly the same thing that stops the same rogue lawyer from putting on a mask and robbing a bank. One is the crime of fraud and the other the crime of armed robbery but they are both crimes. People commit crimes all the time; that is why nearly 1 million people in the U.S. are in jail right now - some of them may even be in there for crimes they actually committed! Were your lawyer to commit this crime he may get caught or he may not; if he does he's going away for a long time and can never work as a lawyer again. So it's simply a matter of risk assessment; oh, and ethics
The state argued, and the jury was convinced, that Mr. Holle turned over his keys specifically intending to facilitate the robbery. They necessarily found that Mr. Holle was not telling the truth when he said he thought it was all a joke. I don't know what evidence they had to demonstrate that, but I could imagine that there was testimony indicating Mr. Holle knew that these people had engaged in similar acts before, that the group spoke of the plan with a level of specificity that made him aware they were not joking, or that he saw them taking other steps to prepare that let him know they were planning a crime. It doesn't matter if he wasn't renting the vehicle or didn't have an agreement to divide the spoils. The question of "why" he facilitated the crime is technically irrelevant to the legal question of whether he facilitated the crime. Nonetheless, I could imagine several reasons why he would have lent his car: he wanted to ingratiate himself with this group, he was bullied into doing it, he believed he would get some of the pot they stole, he didn't like the target, and so on. The fact that he was risking prison time is a uniquely poor argument that he didn't know what he was doing. The risk of punishment is always present for committing a crime, and yet we know that people commit crimes all day, every day. Why do they do it? Probably a good question for psychology.SE.
This is a good question, which I am going to answer from a practical perspective, rather than a theoretical one, which would probably justify a law review article (applications of the takings clause to criminal justice fact patterns is actually one of my pet areas of legal scholarship, but a lot of it calls for dramatic changes in established practice and precedents reached from other perspectives, making it impractical to pursue in real life). I recently had a case along these lines in my office where my client's property was seized as evidence in a criminal case against a third-party. The crime involved a gun shop where all of the guns that were in the possession of the shop owner for repairs at the time of the bust (i.e. as bailments), including ours worth several thousand dollars in addition to having some sentimental value, were seized as evidence of charges against a shop owner who was fencing stolen goods, making sales to felons off the books, falsifying excise tax returns, etc. He seemed legitimate and had been in business for many years in what was not a fly by night operation. He had all of the proper licenses. Who knew we were dealing with a crook? In that case, we intervened on behalf of our client in the primary case to seek the physical return of the property (basically a replevin claim), as have others affected by the bust. It took a few months and some legal fees, but we prevailed without too much effort, as have the other intervenors. Generally speaking, to make a 5th Amendment claim, you would have to show a total taking and move into some legal gray areas in this context, while it is usually hard for authorities to show a continuing need for possession of third-party property in the face of a demand for its return, especially when photography and other scientific tools can document the evidence in great detail these days. In that case, showing that our client's particular gun was not involved in any illegitimate transaction also simultaneously made it less important as evidence, although that would not necessarily be true in general in these kinds of situations. There is a pending case in Colorado posing similar issues, where a suburban police department essentially destroyed a guy's home in order to catch a felon with no relation to the homeowner whatsoever, who had fled into it and taken refuge there. But, that case, as far as I know, has not yet been resolved on the merits.