Keeping found items can still bring larceny charges under Jamaican law

The familiar line that whoever finds something may keep it can sound light-hearted, yet walking away with another person’s lost belongings can land someone in serious trouble. Jamaican law treats the retention of lost property as conduct that may attract criminal liability, with penalties that include fines or a prison term of as much as five years.

Veteran defence counsel Christopher Townsend, in an interview with THE STAR, said the Larceny Act obliges anyone who comes across lost property to take steps aimed at identifying the owner and restoring the item. “The law is pretty clear, it places a duty on you to try and find the owner or try and take reasonable steps to determine who the owner is,” the attorney-at-law said.

According to Townsend, both the situation in which an item is uncovered and what the finder does next help decide whether an offence has occurred. Discovery alone, he stressed, is not automatically larceny. Prosecutors must show that the finder had the property and meant to keep it from the owner for good. “When you find it, the crown must prove that you had the intention of depriving the owner of it,” Townsend said. “So, if you find it and try to find the owner, and you can’t find the owner, and say ‘Cho, mi a keep this for myself, I can’t bother’, then that may not be larceny.”

He emphasised that the finder’s state of mind when the item is first picked up is crucial. “When you find it, you must have the intention at that time to permanently deprive it, therefore, if at the time of finding you believe the owner may not be discovered by taking reasonable steps, that may not be larceny depending on the circumstances. If it is that you take reasonable steps to find the owner and you cannot find the owner ... that may not be larceny. But a lot turns upon the particular circumstances of the finding and circumstances of what you do after.” Even where someone has tried to trace the owner, he added, how the matter ends still hinges on the facts of that case.

Townsend said people who turn cash, bank cards or other personal items over to the police or other proper authorities are doing the right thing. What counts as a reasonable effort, he explained, shifts with the setting. By way of illustration, if a $50 note is found blowing along the road and someone who might have dropped it is close by, the finder ought to ask whether the money is theirs. “If the person said they don’t lose anything then that may mean, having taken those steps, you would have satisfied the requirement, so you would not have the mental element required to form the intent, which is the requirement of the law,” he said.

For anyone who assumes a find becomes theirs by default, Townsend cautioned that the statute does not take that view. “If the person lost it then it doesn’t mean it is no longer theirs, it means they are not in possession at the time. So when you take it, you have permanently deprived the owner. You are not the owner, and you know you are not the owner,” he said.