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Should the value of property stolen drive sentencing outcomes?

By Douglas A. Berman

A new piece I noticed on SSRN indirectly speaks to an issue that arises in the toughest fraud and white-collar cases.  The piece, available here, is titled "Community Perceptions of Theft Seriousness: A Challenge to Model Penal Code and English Theft Act Consolidation." Here is the abstract: In the middle of the 20th century, criminal law reformers helped pass laws that consolidated previously distinct common law offenses such as larceny, embezzlement, false pretenses, extortion, blackmail, and receiving stolen property into a unified offense of theft, imposing uniform punishments for a diversity of methods of stealing and a diversity of types of property that could be stolen.  The result was a "consolidated" scheme of theft, with a single broad definition of property (typically, "anything of value") and a single scheme of grading (based, roughly, on the value of the thing stolen)...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on January 18, 2009 (boomark / email).