Concept

Analyzing a Robbery Problem

Robbery

Analyzing a Robbery Problem

The earlier sections taught each element of robbery separately, but a problem presents them together, folded into a story. At common law, robbery consists of a taking, of the personal property of another, from the other person's body or from an area within the other person's immediate presence, accomplished by force or by intimidation, and carried out with the intent to permanently deprive that person of the property.¹ Every one of those parts must be present, so the failure of any one defeats the charge. That structure points to a method: test the elements in a fixed order, so that no element is skipped and the analysis shows exactly where the facts fall short. A conclusion built on a general sense that the encounter felt violent shows neither of those things, and it invites the reader to overlook the one element the facts actually leave open.

Exam Analysis Steps

Because robbery starts as a theft and is then narrowed by aggravating circumstances, the elements are best run from the theft outward, in roughly the order the story unfolds. The steps are these:

Identify the theft by asking whether the defendant gained possession of personal property belonging to another and carried it away, since a problem with no taking has no robbery to analyze.
Test presence by asking whether the property came from the victim's body or from an area within the victim's immediate presence, remembering that property in other rooms of the same house where the victim is present qualifies.²
Test force or intimidation by asking whether the defendant accomplished the taking through physical force strong enough to overcome resistance, or through a threat of immediate death or serious physical injury.
Test timing by asking whether the force or threat was used to obtain possession or to retain it immediately after obtaining it.
Confirm intent by asking whether the defendant meant to deprive the victim of the property permanently.
Confirm the formulation by checking whether the governing jurisdiction applies the common-law elements or the Model Penal Code's course-of-a-theft definition, and re-run the facts in the Code's terms if it applies the latter.

The order reflects what each step depends on. Robbery borrows its core from larceny, so the property and the taking must be identified before anything can be aggravated. Presence, force, and timing come next because together they describe the confrontation that turns a theft into the more serious offense, and each can be answered from the geography and sequence of events in the story. Intent comes later because it is usually inferred from what the defendant did with the property and why, and by that point the earlier steps have assembled the whole account. The last step belongs at the end of this checklist, but a problem that announces its jurisdiction should be read for that fact first, because the Code's text lists no separate presence element while the common law does.

Each conclusion should be written in the vocabulary of the element it addresses: taking, immediate presence, force or intimidation, intent to permanently deprive. The reason is that contested robbery issues are questions about the meaning of one element applied to one set of facts. Whether brandishing a banana cream pie counts as force or intimidation is a question about that element, and whether a demand that a victim leave a wallet at the defendant's front door the next day is a taking from the person or presence is a question about another.³ Naming the element lets the reader see which standard resolves the question, such as the requirement of an immediate threat of serious injury in the first example, instead of leaving the answer to intuition.

Naming the element also shows where to spend effort. In one illustration, a culprit holds an operating chainsaw in the victim's face and takes property as a fraternity prank, and the fraternity usually returns what it takes.⁴ The force-or-intimidation element deserves a sentence or two there, because an operating chainsaw can inflict lethal harm and no plausible counterargument exists. The intent element deserves the longer discussion, because the prank and the practice of returning items support competing arguments about whether the defendant meant to deprive the owner permanently. A problem rarely makes every element hard, so the fixed order is a way to give each element its due and then to concentrate on the one the facts contest.

Practice patterns show different elements taking center stage. In one, Linda enters a bank, points a gun at a customer named Olga, and tells Olga to collect the cash from the tellers or be killed; Olga complies and hands Linda the bag.⁵ A gunpoint threat of death is intimidation on any reading, so the analysis of step three can be brief. If Linda then strikes the bank guard on the head with her gun after receiving the bag, the live question moves to step four: whether the blow served to keep what she had taken or to prevent immediate pursuit, which would make the force part of the robbery, or had no connection to the property. The same story thus produces different problems depending on which fact the examiner has left open.

A matched pair isolates the element that does the work. In the first scene below, every element is satisfied, and the other-rooms-of-the-same-house rule supplies presence even though the jewelry was upstairs.⁶

Hypothetical Illustration

A defendant points a gun at a homeowner in the kitchen and demands the jewelry. The homeowner, frozen with fear, says it is in an upstairs bedroom, and the defendant goes up, takes it from the bedroom, and leaves, intending to keep it. The jewelry belonged to the homeowner, it came from another room of the house where the homeowner was present, the taking was accomplished by intimidation, and the defendant meant to keep the jewelry permanently. Each element is met, so the defendant is guilty of robbery.

Change one fact. The homeowner is in the kitchen and unaware of the defendant, who quietly enters through an unlocked door, goes upstairs, takes the same jewelry from the same bedroom intending to keep it, and leaves unseen. There is a taking of another's personal property, the property came from the presence of a victim who was in the house, and the intent to keep it is the same. No force and no threat accompanied the taking, so the fourth element fails. The conduct is theft, and other offenses such as burglary may apply, but it is not robbery.

The two scenes differ only in whether the defendant used force or intimidation, and that single variable decides the offense. Presence, taking, and intent come out the same way in both, which is why the sequence matters: a student who found the jewelry taken from the house and stopped there would have convicted the second defendant of robbery without ever testing the aggravator that separates the offense from ordinary theft. In the second scene the failure of one element ends the robbery analysis even though four of the five are satisfied. The final step then asks whether the jurisdiction's own definition changes the questions.

Analyzing a Robbery Problem

Endnotes7