Opinion ID: 1134970
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The sale cases

Text: The classic case of the first category is Regina v. Hall (1848) 169 Eng.Rep. 291. The defendant, an employee of a man named Atkin who made candles from tallow, took a quantity of tallow owned by Atkin and put it on Atkin's own scales, claiming it belonged to a butcher who was offering to sell it to Atkin. The jury were instructed that if they found the defendant took Atkin's property with the intent to sell it back to him as if it belonged to another and appropriate the proceeds, he was guilty of larceny. The jury so found, and the conviction was upheld on further review. The defendant contended that his assertion of temporary ownership of the property for a particular purpose was not enough to constitute the required intent to permanently deprive. The justices expressed two rationales for holding to the contrary. First, one justice stressed that the deprivation would in fact have been permanent unless the owner had agreed to the condition imposed by the defendant, i.e., to buy the property: Baron Parke reasoned, The intention was that the goods should never revert to the owner as his own property except by sale. They were therefore severed from the owner completely unless he chose to buy back what was in truth his own property. ( Regina v. Hall, supra, 169 Eng.Rep. at p. 291.) The second rationale was that the defendant's claim of the right to sell the property was an assertion of a right of ownership and therefore evidence of an intent to permanently deprive: Chief Justice Denman reasoned, The only question attempted to be raised here is as to the animus furandi, the intent to deprive the owner of his property. What better proof can there be of such intent, than the assertion of such a right of ownership by the prisoner as to entitle him to sell it. ( Regina v. Hall, supra, 169 Eng.Rep. at p. 292; accord, Regina v. Manning (1852) 169 Eng.Rep. 619 [defendant took bags owned by a potato-bag dealer, presented them to the dealer as new bags, and demanded payment for them; held, larceny].) The latter rationalethat an intent to permanently deprive is shown by the assertion of a right of ownership in the propertywas again invoked when Regina v. Hall, supra, 169 Eng.Rep. 291, was distinguished from a case in which a pieceworker sought to increase his pay by adding goods produced by other workers to those produced by him: in that case Justice Erie explained, The distinction between the two is sufficiently clear. The test is, whether the person who takes the property assumes to exercise dominion over it as owner. In R[egina] v. Hall , the offer to sell the property to the owner was one of the strongest acts of dominion. ( Regina v. Poole (1857) 7 Cox Crim. Cas. 373, 374.) [5] Perkins offers yet another rationale for the rule that a defendant who takes property for the purpose of selling it back to its owner has the requisite intent to permanently deprive: by so doing the defendant creates a substantial risk of permanent loss, because if the owner does not buy back his property the defendant will have a powerful incentive to keep it in order to conceal the theft. As Perkins explains, in the type of case suggested there is also a very considerable risk that [the owner] will not get back the property at all. If, for example, he should decide that his supply was ample and decline to pay the price, the trespasser would take away the property in order to conceal his own wrongdoing. (Perkins, supra, at p. 329.) As will appear, we find this rationale persuasive.