Claim of Right

Claim of Right

The third branch is aimed at retail-type takings, such as a shopper who lifts goods from a display meaning to pay at once, and it seldom bears on receiving. A receiver acquires goods that someone else has already taken and that the receiver knows or believes to be stolen, which is a poor fit for a shopper's plan to pay. The first two branches carry the weight in receiving cases, and the next two subsections take them up one at a time.

Much of what those two branches protect has already been protected once by the mental elements taught earlier. An intent to deprive another of property implies knowledge that the property belongs to another or that another is entitled to possess it, and the absence of that knowledge is what the tradition calls the absence of a claim of right.⁶ Morissette shows the root of the idea. The defendant sold spent bomb casings as scrap, believing they had been abandoned, the trial court refused to let the jury consider his intent, and the Supreme Court held that the offense carried the common-law requirement of felonious intent.⁷ A receiver stands in the same position. The receiving provision already requires that the receiver know the goods are stolen or believe it probable, so a receiver who honestly thought the goods belonged to the seller has failed to supply the prosecution's knowledge element before any defense is mentioned. The claim-of-right defense takes that same honest belief and makes it something the defendant may assert.

Where the defense and the knowledge element overlap, the practical difference is who carries the task. The prosecution must prove knowledge or belief as part of its own case. The claim of right sits outside the elements, and the defendant must raise it. The reason is functional. The facts that make up a claim of right are facts inside the defendant's own experience: what the defendant was told, what papers the defendant held, and what arrangement gave the defendant title or permission. The prosecution cannot be expected to anticipate and disprove every such possibility in advance, while the defendant is the person able to produce them. Treating the claim as an affirmative defense keeps the prosecution's case focused on the elements and leaves the defendant to bring forward what only the defendant knows. A defendant who stays silent cannot expect the prosecution to disprove a claim nobody has made.

The defense exists because of what receiving punishes. A person who honestly believes the property is their own, or that no one else owns it, lacks the awareness that makes handling the goods culpable, since the wrong in receiving is knowingly helping to keep an owner from property that belongs to that owner. Both of the first two branches therefore turn on the actor's genuine state of mind, and they differ in what the actor believed. The first concerns awareness of someone else's ownership, and the second concerns entitlement to deal with the property as the actor did. The subsections that follow teach each in turn.

Unaware of Another's Ownership

The first branch of the claim-of-right defense in Model Penal Code § 223.1(3) applies when the actor "was unaware that the property or service was that of another."⁹ The words ask about a single fact, namely whether the actor realized that someone else owned the thing. They say nothing about whether the actor knew the owner's name or address, and they say nothing about whether the actor knew the goods had been stolen. An actor who honestly believes that nobody owns the property therefore falls inside the branch, which makes it the defense for the person who picks up what looks like abandoned or ownerless goods. The reason is tied to what theft punishes. The wrong lies in keeping property from a person who has a right to it, and an actor who sees no such person has no awareness of keeping anything from anyone.

The clearest model of that state of mind comes from Morissette v. United States. The case is a larceny-type prosecution under a federal conversion statute and not a receiving case, so it supplies a picture of the mental state rather than a receiving holding. The defendant entered a former Air Force bombing range, collected spent bomb casings that had lain there for years, had them flattened, and sold them as scrap for about $84, claiming he believed they had been abandoned.¹⁰ The trial court told the jury that taking the casings was enough for conviction whatever Morissette believed about them, and the Supreme Court held that the statute carried the common-law requirement of criminal intent, so what he believed about the casings was a question for the jury.¹¹ A person who believes property is ownerless stands where Morissette stood: the person has taken or handled the thing, but sincerely thinks there is no one to be deprived. Under § 223.1(3)(a) that belief is a defense the actor may raise.¹²

In a receiving prosecution this branch overlaps heavily with the knowledge element taught earlier. The receiving provision reaches a person who purposely receives, retains, or disposes of property known or believed to be stolen.¹³ Property can be stolen only if someone else owns it or has the right to possess it, so an actor who knows or believes the goods are stolen necessarily knows or believes that they belong to another. Those two states of mind cannot coexist in one receiver at the same moment, because no one can believe goods probably stolen and also be unaware that they are another's. The branch therefore does work of its own only where the defendant's account is a story of ownerlessness, in which the goods were abandoned, discarded, or salvaged from a heap nobody wanted. A story of legitimacy, in which a seller with apparent title offered the goods, is answered most directly by the knowledge element, because the buyer never believed the goods stolen. In both situations the practical difference is the one drawn in the previous section: the prosecution must prove knowledge or belief, while the defendant must bring forward the claim of right.

The second version shows what the branch does not require. The words ask whether the actor realized that someone else owned the property, so ignorance of the owner's identity gives no help. A buyer told that goods came from a burglary of some store never learns which store, yet knows that the goods have an owner. Students lose this issue when they treat ignorance of who the owner is as ignorance of ownership. The same reasoning disposes of a claim that marriage to the owner changes the picture. An actor who knows the property is a spouse's knows it is another's, and the Code likewise says that theft from a spouse is no defense, while treating the misappropriation of household and personal effects, and other property normally accessible to both spouses, as theft only after the couple has stopped living together.¹⁴

Because the text asks whether the actor was in fact unaware, the inquiry is into what the actor actually believed, and the circumstances of the transaction are the evidence of it.¹⁵ A belief that property was abandoned is easy to credit when casings lay in the open on an old range for years, as in Morissette, and hard to credit when goods arrive at night, new in their cartons, at a fraction of their price. Morissette also shows who weighs that evidence, since the defendant's belief about ownership is a matter the jury must be allowed to decide.¹⁶ On a receiving problem, then, the sequence is to test the knowledge element first, because it belongs to the prosecution's case and absorbs most stories of legitimacy, and then to turn to this branch when the defendant's story is that no one owned the goods.

Honest Claim of Right

The second branch of the claim-of-right defense asks a different question from the first. The first branch looks at whether the actor realized that someone else owned the property, while § 223.1(3)(b) excuses an actor who "acted under an honest claim of right to the property or service involved or that he had a right to acquire or dispose of it as he did."¹⁸ The text reaches two situations. In the first, the actor claims the property itself and believes it to be the actor's own. In the second, the actor makes no claim of ownership but honestly believes there was an entitlement to take the goods, or to sell or give them away, in the manner the actor did, as when the actor holds what the actor takes to be authority from someone entitled to give it. Each belief leaves the actor without any awareness of wronging an owner, which is what makes theft culpable. The third branch, for goods exposed for sale, covers retail-type takings and seldom fits a receiver, so this branch and the first carry the load in receiving cases.¹⁹

The word that controls is honest, and the test it sets is subjective. The question is what the actor genuinely believed, and the answer does not depend on what a reasonable person in the actor's position would have believed. People v. Navarro shows the point. The defendant took wooden beams he believed were worthless and abandoned, and the trial court told the jury to convict unless that belief was reasonable. The appellate court reversed, holding that a good-faith belief in a right to the property defeats the specific intent that theft requires, even when the belief is unreasonable by an objective standard.²⁰ The court leaned on the older California decision in People v. Devine, where the defendant openly drove away hogs, three of which bore another person's brand, and the conviction was reversed because one cannot intend to steal property one believes to be one's own, however careless the belief.²¹ The same logic reaches receiving: a receiver who, by mistake of fact or law, did not know the goods were stolen lacks the required mental state even though a prudent person would have suspected the truth.²² The Code's choice of the word honest, rather than reasonable, points the same way.²³

Honesty and reasonableness are separate questions, but they are linked. A belief can be foolish and still sincere, and the defense protects the sincere one. At the same time, a jury may treat the unreasonableness of a belief as evidence that the actor did not really hold it, since a claim that no sensible person would credit is easier to doubt.²⁴ That inference is what keeps the subjective test from becoming an open door. A claim of right is the actor's own account of the actor's state of mind, which no one else can observe directly, and if the factfinder could not test it against the surrounding facts, a bare assertion would excuse an obvious taking.

Larceny doctrine supplies the clearest picture of an honest claim of right, and it is offered here as an analogy, since a taking is not a receipt. The picture carries over because the Code consolidates the theft offenses into one, so a defense framed for theft applies to a receiving charge as it does to any other form of the offense.²⁵ The connecting link is the intent to deprive. That intent implies knowledge that the property belongs to another or that another is entitled to possess it, so an actor who honestly thinks the goods are the actor's own has no intent to deprive anyone of what is theirs.²⁶

The limit in the first change follows from how the defense works. A belief of entitlement covers what the believer thinks is owed, so it supports a taking only up to that measure, and an actor who knows the goods are worth ten times the debt cannot honestly say the entitlement reaches them all. The second change shows why the Code requires an honest claim: the requirement filters out explanations built after the fact. Evidence of honesty is circumstantial, and a jury weighs it as it weighs any state of mind. The open character of the taking in Devine, a claim voiced at the time of the act, and goods whose value fits the claimed entitlement all point toward sincerity. Concealment, a claim that first surfaces after arrest, and goods worth far more than the claim all point away from it.

The second limb, a right to acquire or dispose of the property as the actor did, deserves its own attention in a receiving case. The offense reaches a person who receives, retains, or disposes of goods,²⁷ so an actor charged with selling or holding them may answer that the actor honestly believed there was a right to do so. The limb is easiest to see in a simple example, and its structure is the same when the goods happen to be stolen.

Because the defense depends on what the actor genuinely believed, a receiving problem that raises it is best run as a short sequence of questions.

Step two does most of the work on exam facts. Students lose this issue when they test whether the belief was reasonable instead of whether it was honest, and unreasonableness matters only as evidence that the claim is not real. The defendant who raises the defense must still bring forward the facts that support it, as the previous section explained.