U.S. v. Sharpton, 73 M.J. 299

Core Criminal Law Subjects: Crimes: Article 121 - Larceny and Wrongful Appropriation Pre-2019 offenses

1. the victim in the case of credit card larceny is the person or entity suffering the financial loss or deprived of the use or benefit of the property at issue
2. the elements of the crime of larceny are: (a) that the accused wrongfully took, obtained, or withheld certain property from the possession of the owner or of any other person; (b) that the property belonged to a certain person; (c) that the property was of a certain value or of some value; and (d) that the taking, obtaining, or withholding by the accused was with the intent permanently to deprive or defraud another person of the use and benefit of the property or permanently to appropriate the property for the use of the accused or for any person other than the owner; the term larceny encompasses and consolidates what in the past were separate crimes, i.e., larceny, larceny by trick, embezzlement, and obtaining property by false pretenses; any of the various types of larceny under Article 121 may be charged and proved under a specification alleging that the accused did steal the property in question
3. wrongfully engaging in a credit, debit, or electronic transaction to obtain goods or money is an obtaining-type larceny by false pretense; such use to obtain goods is usually a larceny of those goods from the merchant offering them; however, alternative charging theories are also available
4. in this case, where appellant used a government purchase card issued by US Bank to make unauthorized purchases from several retail stores, neither the merchants nor US Bank suffered the financial loss resulting from appellant’s larceny; because the Air Force, through DFAS, paid US Bank for all of the unauthorized charges and US Bank paid the merchants, only the Air Force suffered the financial loss, and the government was correct in charging larceny from the Air Force, as the Air Force was the proper victim

Trial Stages: Appeals: Standards of Review, Burdens, etc.

1. questions of law, including questions of legal sufficiency, are reviewed by an appellate court de novo
2. the appellate standard for legal sufficiency is whether, after viewing the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, any rational trier of fact could have found the essential elements of the crime beyond a reasonable doubt