Classification of crimes or offenses

Offenses with which criminal law is concerned fall into several different classifications, of which the following seem to be the most descriptive in terms of substance and procedure: felonies and misdemeanors, both of which are crimes and leave a person convicted of them with a criminal record; and violations, which are not crimes although they are punishable offenses.

Felonies are generally described as offenses that are punishable by death or by imprisonment in a state or federal prison. You will sometimes see these felonies referred to as capital crimes or infamous crimes. These terms have little or no legal significance today. All other crimes, which carry less severe penalties, are misdemeanors.

Violations are punished less severely than crimes. The distinction between felonies and misdemeanors, on the one hand, and violations, on the other, is really the difference in the severity of punishment which is provided for the crime or offense in the law defining the crime. Typical felonies are ones we often read about: murder, rape, larceny, arson, burglary and treason.

Another important difference between felonies and misdemeanors and all other lower offenses lies in your right to trial by jury: if you are suspected of having committed a felony or a more serious misdemeanor, you are brought before a grand jury, indicted (if the grand jury believes you may be guilty), arraigned, given a chance to plead in any one of several ways ("guilty" and "not guilty" are the most common pleas), and offered a jury trial. But if your offense is relatively minor, a less serious misdemeanor or a violation, you are arraigned or brought into court at the motion of the local prosecuting attorney and given a chance to plead; you may or may not have the opportunity to be tried by a jury.

Misdemeanors are offenses which, because they are regarded as less dangerous to society, less evil in themselves, carry a lighter penalty than felonies. Society, therefore, throws fewer protections around those accused of misdemeanors and violations. You are guilty of committing a battery if, unprovoked, you start a fist-fight with your neighbor and punch him in the nose. If he calls the police and you are summoned to appear before the local magistrate the next morning, you will not be offered a jury trial.

When you leave your car an hour too long in a restricted parking area, you have violated a local parking ordinance, but the worst that can happen is that the policeman or meter maid will issue you a summons directing you to pay the appropriate fine by mail or in person by a stated date. In the case of your fist-fight with your neighbor, your summons orders you to appear in court on a certain date at a certain time, "to answer the charges against you". You ignore such a summons at your peril: the judge may fine you for contempt of court.

Larceny

Larceny is the felonious taking and carrying away of someone else's personal property, without his consent, with the intention of permanently depriving him of its use or possession. There are several necessary parts to this offense, which is a felony or a misdemeanor, depending on the value of the property stolen.

In defining larceny, the word felonious means fraudulent; felonious larceny is a taking with intent to steal.

Both a taking and a carrying away are essential. By going into your neighbor's garage without his knowledge or consent and laying your hands on the lawn mower, you have taken it, that is, you have established your (unlawful) possession of it. But there's no larceny until you remove the mower to your property, intending never to return it.

The property taken need only have been in the possession of someone else. If you and your neighbor are having a genuine dispute over who owns the lawn mower, and in entering his garage at night and removing the mower to your property, you think you are merely getting back what is yours, you are nevertheless guilty of the offense of larceny. The crime is directed against possession, not legal title or technical ownership.

Larceny is directed only against personal property. If you chop down a tree on someone else's property, you have not committed larceny. But if you're walking along the road and see a pile of logs in a field and you take a few home for your fireplace, you would be guilty of larceny.

Abandoned property is not the subject of larceny, but lost property is.

Making the distinction between something that has been abandoned and something that has been lost is not always easy. The law in this area starts from the assumption that a person who abandons something does not really intend to recover it, whereas the person who loses or misplaces something does hope to recover it. The owner of abandoned property has discarded his ownership; the owner of lost property has not.

You may not legally take the package as yours. It is regarded not as abandoned, but only as lost or mislaid. Railroad companies operate lost-and-found departments to which their employees refer such packages, so that careless passengers know where to go when they realize they have mislaid them. Lost-and-found items are usually held by the railroad for a certain period of time, then sold at auction.

Larceny may also result from a mistake, depending on the facts. Intent is the controlling factor. Let's say you order a raincoat from a store and pay cash for it but ask to have it sent to you. When the package arrives, you find that what has been delivered is a much more expensive coat. You have an obligation to return what was obviously sent you by mistake. Failure to return it would be larceny, because when you discovered the mistake, you intended to take and to keep something that was not yours.

The difference between grand larceny and petty larceny depends only on the value of what has been stolen. The practical significance is that grand larceny is a felony and petty larceny is only a misdemeanor.