The Intent Permanently to Deprive
| Date | 01 October 1965 |
| Published date | 01 October 1965 |
| DOI | 10.1177/002201836502900408 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
The
Intent Permanently
to Deprive
THE well-known definition of larceny in the Larceny Act,
1916, s. Irequires that the offender should have had the
intent, at the time of taking, permanently to deprive
the
owner of the thing stolen. This article will discuss the question
of permanent deprivation.
The
Larceny Act, 1916, deals with a number of offences
of stealing or ripping, cutting or otherwise damaging or
severing "with intent to steal" and all the ingredients of the
definition in s. Iwould have to be proved in a charge under
that Act.
The
Larceny Act, 1861, however, creates a number
of offencesof "taking" only and, once the taking is proved, the
offence will usually be complete, whether or not the taker
intended to deprive the owner permanently (R. 'D. Glover
1814; R. fgj R.
269)-"taking"
of rabbits in (what is now)
s. 17 of the
1861
Act means "catching"; Fairey 'D. Welch
(1929 I
K.B.
388)-"taking"
of pigeons in s, 23; Wells 'D.
Hardy (1964 2 Q.B. 447)-offence of "taking" fish in s. 24
complete when an angler hooked them, even though it was his
intention to throw them back. By s. 30 it is an offence to take
certain court documents for a fraudulent purpose; in R. 'D.
Bailey (L.R.I.C.C.R. 347) a bailiffproduced his warrantto levy
an execution to the defendant, who seized it with a view to
nullifying any right to levy execution. He was held to be not
guilty of theft of the warrant
but
guilty of an offence under
S·3°·Rather surprisingly, no authority has been found for
the
proposition that a person who snatches an object from another
and destroys it or deals with it in such a way that it is never
likely to be recovered commits larceny e.g. the person who
snatches a ring from another person and throws it into the sea,
off the deep end of a pier, from motives of spite only.
In
R.
'D.
Cabbage
(1815R. fgj R. 292), it was held that, where a thing
had been taken with intent to destroy it, it was not necessary
302
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