highest quality legal defence
Ph: 02 9261 8640
For urgent requests, phone
0412 423 569 (24 hours)
Suite C4, Ground Floor,
185 Elizabeth St, Sydney
NSW 2000 Australia
The Criminal Offence of Larceny
Larceny is a criminal offence. If you are charged with larceny the police must show that you took and carried away the personal goods of another with the intent of disposing of the goods without the consent of the other person.
Police can charge you with larceny in a wide range of situations including:
- if you are acting as a bailee of goods and you take or convert the bailed goods for your own use without the consent of the owner of the goods;
- if you are an employee and you take property belonging to or in the possession of your employer without their consent;
- if you are the tenant of a house and you steal any chattel or fixture that belongs to the property or house;
- if you take and drive another person’s car without their consent or are a passenger in a car that you know has been taken without the consent of the owner;
- if you have stolen property that was in a residential house;
- if you steal goods that are in the process of being manufactured.
The maximum penalty for a charge of larceny is five years imprisonment depending on the value of the property stolen. If the property taken is valued at more than $5,000.00, the matter will usually be dealt with more seriously in a higher court with the involvement of the public prosecutor.
It is possible to defend a charge of larceny on a number of grounds including:- duress in that you were forced to take the property;
- necessity in that you had no choice but to take the property e.g. to prevent a person being harmed;
- self-defence where you believed it was necessary to take the property to defend yourself or another person, to prevent or terminate the unlawful deprivation of liberty or to protect the property from destruction.
It is no defence to a charge of larceny that you intended to return the property you took however it is a defence to larceny if you honestly believed the property belonged to you at the time you took the property.
