Court Opinion

ID: 9757745
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-28 22:57:39.484903+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:28:43.827343
License: Public Domain

*677MANNHEIMER, Judge,
concurring.
The primary issue in this appeal is whether, when a thief steals a container, the thief can be lawfully convicted of stealing the items within that container, even though the thief was ignorant of the contents of the container at the time of the taking.
As Judge Bolger's lead opinion explains, several courts have held that, in these situations, the government need not prove that the thief was subjectively aware of the precise contents of the container. Rather, once the government proves that the thief stole the container, it automatically follows that the thief is guilty of stealing all of the items that one might reasonably expect to find inside a container of that sort.
Lawrence's case, however, can be resolved on a narrower basis. Lawrence's jury was not instructed that, if Lawrence was guilty of stealing the purse, then she was automatically guilty of also stealing whatever was inside the purse. Rather, the jurors were instructed that they could find Lawrence guilty of stealing the contents of the purse-i e., guilty of intending to appropriate the contents of the purse to her own benefit, or guilty of intending to deprive the victim of the contents of the purse-if the evidence supported either of these conclusions.
As explained in the lead opinion, the evidence showed that, after Lawrence stole the purse, she threw the purse away in a place where the owner was unlikely to recover it. In other words, even though Lawrence's immediate objective may have been to steal cash from the purse, she "deprived" the vie-tim of the entire contents of the purse. (Under the definition of "deprive" codified in AS 11,46.990(8)(B), a person deprives an owner of property if they "dispose of the property in such a manner or under such circumstances as to make it unlikely that the owner will recover the property".)
Moreover, the evidence supported the conclusion that Lawrence examined the contents of the purse before she threw the purse away-because the victim's social security card was found torn to pieces.
Thus, the evidence supported the conclusion that, by the end of this criminal episode, (1) Lawrence was subjectively aware of the individual items contained in the purse-in particular, the two access devices-and (2) Lawrence intentionally deprived the owner of these items by disposing of the purse (and its contents) "under such cireumstances as to make it unlikely that the owner [would] recover the property".
Because of the case law suggesting that a thief who steals a container is automatically guilty of stealing the contents as well (even when the thief remains ignorant of those contents), it is possible that Lawrence received a more favorable jury instruction on this issue than she was entitled to. But we need not resolve that question, because the evidence in Lawrence's case supports the conclusion that Lawrence was aware of the contents of the purse, and that she disposed of the purse and its contents with the intent to deprive the owner of this property.