For example, a person charged with violating laws connected with controlled substances must forfeit the substances as well as the raw materials used to make the drugs, vehicles and property used to further the crime, and any money or other proceeds from the sale of the controlled substances. All crimes are defined by statutes. These statutes are collected and organized into books of rules known as criminal or penal codes. In addition to the Texas Penal Code, which applies only in Texas, the federal government has a criminal code that regulates certain crimes nationwide. Most criminal activity violates either a state law or a federal law, not both.
Every crime is defined by a list of elements.
In a criminal trial, the prosecutor attempts to prove all the elements of the crime the person is accused of committing. If all elements are proven, the judge or the jury finds the person guilty of the crime. For example, if a group of teenagers talks about how easy they think it would be to walk out of a store with a pair of jeans, they have not committed a crime, nor have they committed an attempted crime. However, if they deactivate a store's alarm system so it cannot detect what passes through the doors, they probably have committed a tampering or vandalism crime as well as attempted theft. They have taken a substantial step toward the commission of the theft.