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Larceny

Larceny is a crime involving the unlawful taking or theft of the personal property of another person or business. It was an offence under the common law of England and became an offence in jurisdictions which incorporated the common law of England into their own law (also statutory law), where in many cases it remains in force.

For other uses, see Larceny (disambiguation).

The crime of larceny has been abolished in England, Wales, Ireland, and Northern Ireland, broken up into the specific crimes of burglary, robbery, fraud, theft, and related crimes. However, larceny remains an offence in parts of the United States, Jersey,[1] and in New South Wales,[2] Australia, involving the taking (caption) and carrying away (asportation) of personal property without the owner's consent and without intending to return it.

Etymology[edit]

The word "larceny" is a late Middle English word, from the French word larcin, "theft". Its probable Latin root is latrocinium, a derivative of latro, "robber" (originally mercenary).

Elements[edit]

Possession versus custody[edit]

Larceny is a crime against possession. Furthermore, it has two elements which must be met: the actual taking of the property, even if momentarily (actus reus), and the culpable intent to deprive another of their property (mens rea). Larceny involves the trespassory taking of property from possession of another, with the intent to permanently deprive the owner of that property.[17]: 945  To understand larceny, one must understand the distinction between custody and possession.[18]

Problem areas[edit]

Subject matter[edit]

As noted above one cannot steal items "affixed to the earth" because such things are not personal property. However, one of the remarkable qualities of property is its shiftiness: its ability to change its character often and quickly, from real to personal and from personal to real. The principal methods of achieving this transformation are attachment and severance. If personal property is attached to land, it becomes real property. And if real property is severed from the land (rendered unattached) it becomes personal property. Examples abound. A person buys a furnace. The furnace company dispatches a technician to deliver and install the heating system. Before installation the heating system is personal property. It has corporeal presence and it can be moved around as witnessed by the fact that the technician picked it up at the warehouse, loaded it into his truck, drove it to the house, unloaded it, placed it in the basement and hooked it up to the house. The "hooking up" is the act that transformed what was personal property to real property. Once it is installed it has become "attached to the land" (the house) and is now considered real property. The attachment to the house has to be more than casual for personal property to become real property. For example, a table lamp that is plugged into a wall socket is not real property. A window air conditioning unit is not real property.

Comparison with embezzlement[edit]

Embezzlement differs from larceny in two ways. First, in embezzlement, an actual conversion must occur; second, the original taking must not be trespassory.[49] To say that the taking was not trespassory is to say that the person(s) performing the embezzlement had the right to possess, use, and/or access the assets in question, and that such person(s) subsequently secreted and converted the assets for an unintended and/or unsanctioned use. Conversion requires that the secretion interferes with the property, rather than just relocate it. As in larceny, the measure is not the gain to the embezzler, but the loss to the asset stakeholders. An example of conversion is when a person logs checks in a check register or transaction log as being used for one specific purpose and then explicitly uses the funds from the checking account for another and completely different purpose. It is important to make clear that embezzlement is not always a form of theft or an act of stealing, since those definitions specifically deal with taking something that does not belong to the perpetrator(s). Instead, embezzlement is, more generically, an act of deceitfully secreting assets by one or more persons that have been entrusted with such assets. The person(s) entrusted with such assets may or may not have an ownership stake in such assets.


In the case where it is a form of theft, distinguishing between embezzlement and larceny can be tricky.[50] Making the distinction is particularly difficult when dealing with misappropriations of property by employees. To prove embezzlement, the state must show that the employee had possession of the goods "by virtue of her employment"; that is, that the employee had the authority to exercise substantial control over the goods. Typically, in determining whether the employee had sufficient control the courts will look at factors such as the job title, job description and the particular employment practices. For example, the manager of a shoe department at a store would likely have sufficient control over the shoes that if she converted the goods to her own use she would be guilty of embezzlement. On the other hand, if the same employee were to steal cosmetics from the cosmetic counter, so long as they did not convert the product, the crime would not be embezzlement but larceny. For a case that exemplifies the difficulty of distinguishing larceny and embezzlement see State v. Weaver, 359 N.C. 246; 607 S.E.2d 599 (2005).

Pickpocketing