Receipt of Stolen Property

Receipt of Stolen Property

The offenses covered so far each look at one transaction, the one between the defendant and the person whose property is at stake. Larceny asks whether the defendant took possession from the owner through a trespassory taking, because the offense protects possession.¹ Embezzlement reaches the person the owner entrusted with the property who then fraudulently converts it. Parliament created it after a bank teller who pocketed a customer's deposit escaped a larceny charge for want of a taking from the owner's possession.² False pretenses reaches the person who lies the owner out of title. Receipt of stolen property moves the inquiry downstream, to a transaction in which the owner plays no part: the question becomes whether the defendant knowingly took the goods from a thief.

The reason a separate offense is needed lies in what each of the earlier offenses requires. Each one demands a wrong done to the owner in the course of getting the property: a trespassory taking from the owner's possession, a breach of the owner's trust, or a lie that induces the owner to pass title. A buyer who purchases goods from a burglar commits none of these. The burglar hands the goods over willingly, so nothing is taken from the burglar by trespass. The buyer never deals with the owner, so there is no entrusting and no deceit, and the owner's possession was lost before the buyer appeared. A second thief who snatches goods from the first thief without consent is a different case, because the first thief's possession is superior to the snatcher's and larceny reaches the snatching. Without a further offense, the person who knowingly accepts stolen goods would fall through the gap. The elements of receiving are drawn to close it while reaching only those who knowingly receive property that is still stolen and who intend to keep the owner from it.

At common law, receipt of stolen property is a misdemeanor with five elements.³ Because the elements are conjunctive, the prosecution must establish every one. The analysis runs most reliably in the order below, which moves from the property and the act of receiving, to the defendant's knowledge, to the identity of the thief, and finally to the defendant's purpose.

Two of these elements carry reasons that are worth stating now. The requirement that someone other than the recipient committed the underlying crime follows from what receiving means. Receiving presupposes a source and a recipient, so a thief who simply keeps the goods has received them from no one, and the thief's conduct is already punished as the theft itself. The permanent-deprivation element supplies the culpable purpose, and it mirrors the intent that larceny demands. A person who takes goods from a thief in order to hand them back to the owner has no purpose of keeping the owner from them. Together with the knowledge element, that purpose requirement means the offense reaches the handler who profits from stolen goods and leaves alone the person who recovers them for the owner. The next three subsections take the elements in clusters: the stolen status of the property, what counts as receipt, and the knowledge and intent requirements.

On an exam stem, the first sorting question is where the defendant stands in the chain of events. Students lose this issue when they apply the receipt label to the thief who kept the goods, since the offense presupposes that another person committed the underlying crime.⁴ Once the defendant is a downstream recipient, the remaining elements test whether the property was still stolen, whether the defendant gained control, and whether the defendant knew the source and meant to keep the goods from the owner.

Stolen Status of Property

The second element in the receipt analysis looks at the goods rather than at the defendant. Property must still carry its stolen status at the moment the defendant receives it, and goods can lose that status before the defendant ever arrives.⁶ The reason lies in what the offense assumes. Receiving punishes the person who takes goods out of a thief's hands and so helps keep the owner from them, which means each receipt extends the harm that the original theft began. That assumption holds only while the goods remain in the chain of control the theft created, outside the owner's reach.

Police recovery with the owner's permission is the clearest event that breaks the chain. When law enforcement recovers stolen goods and, with the owner's permission, uses them in an undercover operation, the goods no longer qualify as stolen property.⁷ They are back under the control of officers acting with the owner's consent, so a transfer made on those terms takes nothing from the owner that the owner has not allowed. A defendant who takes the goods from an officer in that setting therefore receives property that is no longer stolen, and the completed offense of receipt is not committed. The defendant may still be guilty of attempt.⁸

The two buyers match in knowledge, payment, and purpose, and they differ only in whether the goods were still stolen when received. That isolates the lesson. Stolen status is a fact about the goods, and the defendant's belief cannot supply it. The knowledge element asks a separate question about the defendant's state of mind, taken up below, and it is satisfied in both scenes. Only the first scene has property that the offense can reach.

Because the status is measured at the moment of receipt, the timing of any recovery decides the outcome. A recovery that precedes the transfer, followed by use of the goods with the owner's permission, removes the stolen status before the defendant acts. A recovery that comes after a completed receipt does not undo it, since the goods were still stolen when the defendant took them. On an exam stem, the first sorting question is therefore what happened to the goods before the defendant received them. Students lose this issue when they treat the buyer's belief that the goods are stolen as enough and overlook a stem fact that police had already recovered the goods and were using them with the owner's permission.⁹

Receipt Through Control

The first element of the receipt analysis asks whether the defendant received possession and control of the property.¹¹ Everyday speech pulls toward a narrow reading in which receiving means taking the goods into one's hands, and that reading would make hands-on handling the only way to satisfy the element. The element is framed around control, which means authority over what happens to the goods, and a defendant can hold that authority without ever touching them. Larceny's caption element is framed in the same terms, as actual control over the property.¹² Handling is one way to prove control, but the prosecution may rely on other facts that show the same authority. The two that arise most often are a thief who places the goods where the defendant designates, and a defendant who arranges a profitable sale of the goods to a third person.

Each form of control rests on its own reason. A defendant who designates where the goods will be left has taken over the decision about where they rest, and a thief who complies has put the goods at the defendant's disposal, so the chosen location is simply the defendant's place of custody. A defendant who arranges a profitable sale has taken over the decision about where the goods go next, which is the kind of dominion over disposition an owner would exercise. Beneath both lies an incentive point. A dealer in stolen goods has every reason to stay a step away from the property, because handling is the fact easiest for a witness or an officer to prove. If receipt required manual handling, a defendant could direct the thief to a garage or route the goods to a buyer, collect the benefit, and escape the offense, so the rule would catch only careless handlers and miss the people who run the trade. Counting control as receipt closes that route at its source.

The two scenes match on the defendant's knowledge and on the fact that the defendant never handles the goods, so touching cannot be what separates them. The difference is that in the first scene the defendant's instruction fixed where the goods went and the thief obeyed, while in the second the conversation gave the defendant no authority over the goods at all. Interest in stolen goods, however keen, and knowledge that they are stolen do not amount to control. Control answers only the first element, so the knowledge of the criminal source, the identity of a thief other than the defendant, and the intent to permanently deprive the owner each still has to be proved separately.

On an exam stem, the usual error runs in one of two directions. Students lose this issue when they conclude there was no receipt because the defendant never touched the goods, overlooking a stem fact that the defendant chose the drop-off spot or lined up the buyer.¹³ The opposite error treats a defendant's talk about wanting the goods as control, even though nothing in the stem shows the goods ever answering to the defendant. Once control is established, the analysis moves to the defendant's mind, where the knowledge and intent requirements come next.

Knowledge and Intent

Three of the five receipt elements concern the defendant's state of mind and the defendant's place in the chain of events, rather than the goods or the act of receiving them. They are knowledge that the property came from criminal conduct, the requirement that someone else committed that conduct, and the intent to permanently deprive the true owner.¹⁵ Each element screens out a different kind of person who would otherwise be swept in. Stolen goods look the same to everyone who handles them, so the property and the transfer alone cannot separate a knowing handler from a shopper who buys the identical item across a store counter. The three questions below draw that line.

The knowledge element requires that the defendant know, when receiving the goods, that another person obtained them by conduct constituting a criminal offense.¹⁶ The reason is partly fairness and partly aim. A buyer who pays a legitimate-looking seller has no way to detect that the item carries a history of theft, so a rule that dispensed with knowledge would expose every purchase of used goods to the risk of a misdemeanor conviction for something the buyer could not have discovered. Requiring knowledge confines liability to the person who chose to deal in goods that person understood to be tainted, which is the person who keeps a market for stolen property open. A price far below market value is evidence from which a factfinder may infer knowledge, while the element the prosecution must prove remains what the defendant actually knew about how the seller came by the goods.

The fourth element asks who committed the criminal conduct the defendant knows about, and the answer must be someone other than the recipient.¹⁷ Receiving describes a transfer from one person to another, so the offense presupposes a source and a recipient. A burglar who carries goods out of a house and keeps them has received them from no one, because the only wrongdoing to which the goods trace back is the burglar's own. The law already punishes that wrongdoing as the theft itself, and a second conviction for receiving would punish the same person twice for holding the same loot. The element therefore leaves the thief to the theft offense, while a downstream buyer of the goods remains a recipient, since the criminal conduct that preceded the buyer's purchase was someone else's.

The second and third scenes fail for different reasons, and the difference matters on an exam. In the second scene someone else did commit a crime, and the defendant simply did not know it, so the failure is a mental one. In the third scene the defendant may know everything about the goods, and the element still fails, because the criminal conduct belongs to the defendant and receiving requires that it belong to another. A stem that gives the defendant full knowledge does not answer the fourth element, and a stem that gives another person's crime does not answer the third.

The fifth element requires that the recipient act with the intent to permanently deprive the true owner of the owner's interest in the property.¹⁸ This is the same specific intent that larceny demands of the person who takes goods in the first place, and it does the same work here. It separates a recipient who means to keep the owner from the property from one whose dealing with the goods leaves the owner's interest intact. A recipient who keeps the goods, or resells them to someone who will keep them, intends that the owner never recover them, so the element is met. A recipient who takes the goods in order to restore them lacks that purpose and does not commit the offense, even though the recipient knew the goods were stolen and took control of them. Combined with the knowledge element, the intent element reaches the handler who profits from stolen goods and spares the person who retrieves them for the owner.

On an exam stem, the usual error is to let one of these screens stand in for another. Students lose this issue when they treat a suspiciously low price as if it established the knowledge element, or when they find intent to deprive in a defendant who is plainly returning the goods to their owner.¹⁹ With all five elements now in hand, the last section of this chapter steps back from the individual offenses to ask what becomes of these distinctions when a single statute merges them.