U.S. v. Williams, 75 M.J. 129

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

1. an Article 121, UCMJ, conviction does not turn on identifying the victims, impact, and loss as those terms are commonly used and employed; rather, it requires, inter alia, that an appellant steal something from a person who owns it or has a greater possessory interest in it than the appellant
2. theft of services are, unlike goods, not tangible and capable of being possessed, and thus not the proper object of larceny under Article 121
3. Article 121, UCMJ, sought to consolidate the various means of stealing — by larceny, false pretense, and embezzlement — under the single rubric of larceny; in one sense, the particular means of acquisition of the property became relatively unimportant; however, the person stolen remains important with the elemental requirement that the accused wrongfully obtain money or goods from a person or entity with a superior possessory interest
4. the relevant question with respect to larceny in determining the person to name in a larceny specification is whom did the accused steal the goods or money from; and a person can refer both to a natural person and to a government, a corporation, an association, an organization, and an estate; such a person need not be a legal entity
5. when an accused engages in a wrongful credit or debit transaction, he has usually stolen from the merchant offering the purchased goods or the entity presenting the money; that is, typically, when larceny is by means of a wrongful credit or debit transaction, the money or goods were wrongfully obtained from the merchant or bank, making them the person stolen from; the goods or money at issue belong to the merchant or banks, and the accused merely uses the credit or debit card, falsely representing himself as the cardholder, as a means to commit the larceny; while it is true that the credit or debit cardholder may also suffer a consequence — such as a bank fee or loss of access to funds in an account — the accused nonetheless did not obtain money or goods from the cardholder
6. in the usual case of a credit card or debit card larceny, the person who should be alleged in the specification is a person from whom something was obtained, whether it is goods or money
7. alternative charging theories are available under Article 121, UCMJ, as long as the accused wrongfully obtained goods or money from someone with a superior possessory interest; such alternative theories are the exception and not the rule
8. in the usual case of debit card theft, an accused obtains nothing from the cardholder through an unauthorized use of the cards
9. in this case, appellant’s actions constituted a garden-variety larceny by unauthorized use of debit card information, and the usual rule — that the person who was stolen from, or from whom larceny was attempted, was the merchant from whom the goods were obtained or the bank from whom money was obtained — applies; the account holders here did not own either the goods or the bank funds available to satisfy the debit card purchases
10. if a defendant did not steal from the person the government names in the larceny specification, the conviction is legally insufficient

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

1. the test for legal sufficiency is whether, considering the evidence in the light most favorable to the prosecution, a reasonable factfinder could have found all the essential elements beyond a reasonable doubt