Court Opinion

ID: 9561443
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-21 18:09:53.801207+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:13:49.082923
License: Public Domain

MANNHEIMER, Judge,
concurring.
I am writing, not to supplement Chief Judge Bryner’s careful analysis of AS 11.-46.990(8)(A), but to summarize what, to my mind, is the underlying flaw in Glidden’s conviction.
The trial court instructed the jury that Glidden could be found guilty of theft if he deprived Brown of the “benefit” of owning *612the stereo, even if this benefit was not an “economic” benefit. This was error; for theft to be committed, the owner must suffer deprivation of an economic benefit of the property. But this error, of itself, was harmless in Glidden’s case, because the only benefit being litigated was an economic benefit.
The government claimed that Glidden had deprived Brown of the use of stereo equipment. As we recognize in our main opinion, one of the “economic” benefits of owning or possessing property is the ability to make use of the property (so long as this use can be evaluated in monetary terms). The benefit of using stereo equipment to play music for one’s enjoyment is an economic benefit. Though the trial court may have used erroneous reasoning when formulating its answer to the jury, the substance of the court’s answer was correct: the jury was legally entitled to treat Brown’s ability to use the stereo equipment as a “benefit” when deciding whether Glid-den was guilty of theft.
The flaw in Glidden’s conviction lies in the fact that the jury instructions allowed the prosecutor to argue that Glidden could be convicted of theft even if the jury accepted Glidden’s explanation that he had intended to deprive Brown of the stereo equipment for only a few weeks. The prosecutor argued that complete deprivation of the use of the stereo equipment, even for a short period of time, constituted the loss of “the major portion of its ... benefit” required for a theft conviction.
This argument was wrong. As the Model Penal Code’s lawn mower example makes clear, the economic benefit of owning or using property is evaluated over the useful life of the property. Because the useful life of stereo equipment is several years, and because there was no evidence that renting another stereo system for a few weeks would have cost Brown nearly as much as buying a new one, the loss of a few weeks’ use of the stereo equipment did not constitute a loss of the major portion of its benefit.
Given the prosecutor’s closing argument and the failure of the jury instructions to clarify the flaw in that argument, there is a strong likelihood' that the jury convicted Glidden of theft even though they thought he had committed the equivalent of joyriding. For this reason, Glidden’s conviction must be reversed.