Why wouldn’t he? The property is still stolen. Just because it passes through a pawn shop does not mean it’s been laundered.
I’ve heard of people unknowingly buying stolen cars. They are out the money they purchased the car for unless they can find the person that sold them the stolen car. The car always go back to the original owner. I’m guessing that stolen cars are easier to track.
Well, since we’re seeing some cites that pawnbrokers have a right to appeal, it seems like the new buyer might also have some rights. I guess maybe the new buyer’s right may be to take the pawnbroker to court, though.
In general a thief cannot pass title to someone else.
Now that is just a “general rule.” The courts have ruled in certain cases a thief DID in fact pass title.
Artwork for instance and coins are classic examples where they’ve been stolen and then sold time and time and time again, and the original owner has indeed pressed and got the item back.
Most states though have a statute of limitations for pressing claims, usually it’s 3 years. But even this is subject to “discovery.” There was a famous case in NYC where a thief stole artwork and it was passed till someone believing they bought it legitimately put it on public display. This started a chain reaction. The court rules the 3 year statute period started from the time a resonable person could’ve discovered it.
However in Indiana for instance, the Greek Orthadox Chruch lost a suit because they didn’t bring charges quick enough.
The difference you’ll find in state laws is basically places like NY and California which have huge markets for art, especially art in private collections the laws tend to be very liberal toward the person that had it stolen. The California court ruled that it was not the court’s place to allow a thief to steal and stash it away for a time period to allow him to have legitimate title to it.
The answer always seems to be if someone is in possession of your goods and you had them stolen, you have to follow proper channels to get them back. And if the item is of little value it may be easier just to pay up the pawn shop as other posters have noted.
You remember OJ in Vegas of course, that clearly shows, even though something is yours, you don’t have the right to just go in and take it back willy nilly, there are proper procedures you must follow.
I went through this situation myself (in Washington state).
I was playing bass in a band. Our guitarist was a fantastic player who, because of a rough stretch (his own fault, due to chemical addictions that he was supposedly over) did not at the time have his own guitar. I was letting him use my electric guitar and small amp, both cheap things I’d bought just to have something to thrash on when I was in the mood. Cheap the gear might have been, but this guitarist made that guitar sound very sweet. We had a regular “house band” gig, playing three nights a week at a local bar.
Well, one night the drummer and I showed up for the gig, and the guitarist wasn’t there. We waited. And waited. And waited. By 30 minutes past the time we were supposed to start playing, it was clear that the guitarist wasn’t going to show. Unfortunately he didn’t have a phone, so we had no way to get hold of him to find out where he was.
The few days later we found out where he was: gone. My drummer bumped into some people the guitarist had lived with briefly, and found out that he’d broken into their house and stolen some audio equipment, the same night he didn’t show for the gig.
I had little choice but to call the police and report my stuff stolen. Within a couple weeks the stolen audio equipment was located at one local pawn shop, and that led to my guitar and amp being found at yet another pawn shop (he had spread the stuff around so as not to arouse suspicion by trying to pawn too much stuff at one place). It happened that he pawned my stuff at the same pawn shop that I use when I need to pawn something (my own stuff, of course, and I always redeem the stuff I pawn). Fortunately I had photos of the guitar and amp, as well as the guitar’s serial #. It was the police who located the stuff, though, so I didn’t have to personally try to recover it. The police had already confiscated the stuff before they called me, so I picked it up at the police station.
The pawn shop owners were happy to give my stuff back, but they were obviously none too pleased about being out the $90 they’d paid for it (though how he managed to get $90 is a mystery to me - when I said the stuff was “cheap”, I mean that I paid less than $200 total for the gear, and I bought it new from a legitimate dealer). They really couldn’t be faulted for taking the stuff, either. Like me, this guitarist was a regular customer of the pawn shop, and had a legitimate history of pawning and redeeming things there, so the owners didn’t think anything of it when he pawned a guitar and amp.
(Followup to all that: guitarist guy had taken the money and fled to Las Vegas, where he stayed for a couple years until he got picked up for something else, the arrest warrant for his thefts here was discovered, and he was extradited back here. He went to trial, pled guilty, and did some time in jail. When he got out of jail he made a point of tracking me down and personally apologizing. He’s since cleaned himself up, found a regular job, and made restitution.)
The law in Ohio is pretty much what said above.
.
We buy coins and jewelry from perhaps 50-150 people/day. We’re not a pawn shop, but are rather governed by the Ohio Precious Metals Dealers License. It’s virtually the same.
If you bought a half carat diamond ring for $2000 at the retail jewelry store, we might, if we need it, offer you $400. While that seems low, you have to remember that the jewelry store might have only paid $700 new for that item. So, you want to sell a used wedding ring, I’m willing to pay $400 to put it into inventory.
In the case of us purchasing a stolen ring, if the police call us and give us a name or have something we can use to identify the ring, then the true owner has the options I listed above. We usually find that the owner is very glad we were able to assist them, and is very willing to buy it back from us for the $400. Yes, they could sue us for return of the ring, and we’d probably have to give it back for free. It might cost them less time and money to just buy it back. I believe they can try to recover that cost from the criminal–sometimes it’s easy, most times not.
If we, or a pawn broker, buy an item in good faith, keep the required records, and cooperate with the police, then they have little reason to prosecute us as being fences. They could try, but if you’re using due diligence, they seldom do.
Granted, it’s been ages since I worked in the pawn industry (10+ years) but I was a closing store manager for a corporate, national pawn chain at one point in my life, in the state of Colorado. Stolen merchandise is something you inevitably end up dealing with in that industry - and our response to it varied based off the circumstances of the discovery of the merchandise.
-
If Joe Schmoe came off of the street saying he’d been robbed and he wanted to know if any thing had been pawned matching X description, we weren’t technically allowed to tell them anything other then to report it to the police (not sure if this was law or store policy - but I do know that, if we suspected we did have the item, we’d often give them the card and a personal recommendation of an officer that worked theft/robbery cases that we knew).
-
If a police officer came in with questions/etc, we were of course given more liberty with what information we could provide, but we still had to keep the merchandise (locked up, of course) until there was a warrant for its seizure or other legal document allowing us to return it to its rightful owner. If there wasn’t, though, we’d flag the item in our system and call our friend on the department if anyone came in looking to pick it back up, just in case.
-
If an officer came in with a warrant, obviously, we’d happily turn it over and just as happily testify at the trial. Which I did, on a number of occasions (but less then I would have thought, for the five years I spent in the industry.)
-
If a person claiming to be the rightful owner was able to produce sufficient evidence that the item was theirs (serial numbers, photos, police report, etc) AFTER the item had been pulled from “loans” and put into “sales”, but without an official legal document claiming their right, we gave them the option of buying the item for the original loan value (significantly less then the sale price), or placing it on “one-penny layaway” until the case was resolved, so as to ensure that it didn’t get sold.
The latter option was pretty rare, but happened on occasion. Usually, the police came in with a warrant, we helped them load it in their cars, and then it spent the rest of eternity in an evidence locker. I actually had one customer who went through both ordeals - he had a regrettable instinct for dating drug addicts who stole and pawned his stuff - and he said he preferred the latter option because, after the hassle and headache of trying to get his stuff back from the police on a case that was still technically open when they couldn’t track down his latest transient addict former girlfriend, he’d rather pay the pitiful amount we loaned on the item to just have it back.
Oh, and in cases where the police seized the item and then returned it to the victim (eventually), we never pursued the thief in court beyond testifying at their criminal trial, figuring it a lost cause (at least we didn’t in the five years I worked there). We just wrote the lost money off on either taxes or insurance.
samclem, this is interesting. But can you explain why the old adage “buyer beware” doesn’t apply to you?
I am going to presume it’s the pawn shop lobby. Trade groups have a great deal of power in convincing state and local legislators in carving out favorable rules and regulations specific to that industry.
Although, I could be wrong, so if one of the legal eagles could correct me if I am-- But Ohio’s statute appears to read that the victim can not only recover the property in question from the pawn shop via a court proceeding but can also recover attorney’s fees. So it seems it would not be in the pawn shop’s interest to fight the matter and just cough up the property if the pawn shop sees any likelihood of the property belonging to the party bringing the suit.
1.) When I worked for Gamestop we kept track of the serial numbers of all the systems that people sold to us. We had a PSP’s serial number flag up as stolen a few days after we bought it and the police came and took it. As far as I know it was given back to the owner and he didn’t have to buy it off of us.
2.) I know that the History Channel reality show Pawn Stars isn’t really a reliable source of information, but in one of the episodes cops came and took what turned out to be a stolen necklace and it was given back to the owner. The owner of the pawn shop commented that this is why they had to be super careful about not taking in stolen stuff, because they wouldn’t make money off of it.
Maybe it differs from place to place?
You would actually make a person buy back a stolen item that you have in your store? Damn. I would press charges if it was my ring.
Maybe that, maybe it was staged, or maybe Rick is just honest.
I had the same experience - in Texas. Two high dollar guitars, I had the serial numbers, the “identifying marks” etc. It didn’t mean shit.
Well this is all very distressing. >.<
I thought that their having to return property that’s discovered to be stolen was their primary incentive to be careful about not buying stolen goods. Now they’re basically fences in all but name!
IANAL but my understanding is that the original legal owner retains his legal ownership. If the stolen item is located it still legally belongs to him and he gets it back. This supercedes the ownership rights of other people who might have acquired subsequent ownership of the item, even if they did so in good faith and without breaking any law.
Pawn shops presumedly have insurance to cover the expense of having to turn over merchandise that they legitimately purchased but later turned out to be stolen. The loss of the item that way would be an expense like like losing an item to shoplifting or a fire.
Because that in fact is how the law works for everyone else. Title to stolen goods does not pass.
State law varies. The law is complicated. This isn’t legal advice and etc. But…
Generally, the relevant law here is UCC 2-403, specifically section 1 along with the common law right of replevin.
UCC 2-403:
§ 2-403. Power to Transfer; Good Faith Purchase of Goods; “Entrusting”.
(1) A purchaser of goods acquires all title which his transferor had or had power to transfer except that a purchaser of a limited interest acquires rights only to the extent of the interest purchased. A person with voidable title has power to transfer a good title to a good faith purchaser for value. When goods have been delivered under a transaction of purchase the purchaser has such power even though
•(a) the transferor was deceived as to the identity of the purchaser, or
•(b) the delivery was in exchange for a check which is later dishonored, or
•© it was agreed that the transaction was to be a “cash sale”, or
•(d) the delivery was procured through fraud punishable as larcenous under the criminal law.
What is being noted specifically is the difference between a ‘void’ title and a voidable title. That is, a thief has no title to pass, so when you buy him from him, you get the same title he had, which is none. But fraud (and some other acts) result in a voidable title, which is different - it requires a pressing of rights so to speak, a purchaser in good faith who buys from a seller with voidable but not voided title gains full title.
There is, however, the possibility of adverse possession, abandonment or any other number of ways that soemone could come upon goods that appear to be yours without having purchased from a thief. This is most likely why states don’t automatically give you ‘your’ goods from a pawn store - you have to prove the superiority of your title and that typically requires a court.
Replevin is pretty interesting because it is an instance of specific recovery. Common law typically only allows for money damages in nearly any instance of harm, but replevin allows someone to recover an exact item. A replevin action typically requires the person seeking recovery to post a bond for the item with court before taking possession of the item (called a replevy) and then an actual suit for replevin - where rights would be determined as to the property - this would basically be the same as a detinue sur trover - a very old writ which is a type of interference tort.
Sure, you could also have your friend “steal” or “find” your camera, then go to the pawn shop and sell it. Come back and give you the money and then you go to the pawn shop and retrieve your item. A dishonest person could attempt to make money this way.
The basic legal principle is called nemo dat quod non habet. Translation : Nobody can give away what they do not own. A thief does not legally own the items he stole. If he sells it to a pawn shop, then the shop does not legally own them. And if the pawn shop then sells it to a customer, the customer does not legally own it either. The original owner had the right to recover.
Someone who buys stolen property in good faith is not necessarily out of pocket - they can sue the seller to recover their money.
You left out the part where the friend goes and files a police report under penalty of perjury.