Criminal Record for... Finding 20 Quid

She doesn't have a criminal record; she got a conditional discharge. This means that unless she offends again within a period fixed by the court (not stated in the Independent report, but usually between 12 months and 3 years) she is treated as never having been convicted.

It's at the lighter end of the range of sentences for theft, and it reflects the fact that the amount she stole was small, and there was no premeditation.

But, yeah, you pick up money that doesn't belong to you and take it away, making no effort to find the owner or get the money back to them - that's theft. You don't know whose the money is, but you do know it's not yours.

She was convicted of theft - she pleaded guilty, in fact - but the sentence imposed, a conditional discharge, is one that avoids her getting a criminal record on account of the conviction (as long as she doesn't offend further).

So the BBC headline is correct, but the Independent headline is wrong. (No great surprise there!)

Deleted User wrote: »

This is the perfect subject for a discussion forum then.

When you see a 1 cent coin on the street do you post it back to the mint?

Irrelevant. There's no reason to think that the mint is the true owner of the coin, or can trace the true owner.

To be convicted of theft, one of the necessary elements that the prosecution has to prove is that you "intended permanently to deprive" the true owner of the property in question. In a theft-by-finding case, they do this by showing that you didn't take the reasonable steps that somebody would take if they wanted to try to find the true owner. What those steps are depends on the circumstances of the finding.

In this case the money was found in a shop. It's foreseeable that someone who has lost a non-trivial amount in a shop or other commercial premises will go back to shop to ask if anyone has handed it in (and in fact that's exactly what happened in this case) so the reasonable thing for a finder to do is to report the finding to the shop proprietor/manager. In this case, the video evidence showed that the finder simply trousered the money and walked out of the shop. She later denied taking the money, when asked, which is not consistent with an intention to return it to the true owner; it looks more like an attempt to avoid having to return it.

Finding money in the street is a different matter. If the circumstances suggest the money hasn't been there very long, and there's someone twenty metres further on who has just pulled his phone out of his pocket, you might call to him and ask him if he dropped the money. On the other hand, if the condition of the money suggests that it has been lying in the gutter for hours, and the street is deserted, there's no-one to ask.

The state won't bring a prosecution unless they expect to get a conviction, and in a theft-by-finding case they won't get a conviction unless they have evidence to show an intent to deprive the true owner. What that evidence might be sufficient is going to depend on the circumstances of the finding. It's easy to think of circumstances where there's basically nothing realistic that you can do to try to trace the true owner, and in those cases you won't be prosecuted.