Orange County Shoplifting Lawyer

Another client went through self-checkout at a similar store, scanned most of what she was buying, and missed a couple of items. The loss was around $150. No loss prevention officer stopped her. No police officer was called. She went home.

The store’s cameras identified her, and days later officers came to her front door and handed her a citation for shoplifting. She was put into judicial diversion, and the case was dismissed and both the arrest and case were sealed.

This is now routine rather than unusual. Police in California can cite or arrest for a misdemeanor shoplift that no officer witnessed, working from store surveillance and an employee’s account. Two things follow from that, and both matter to you.

• Walking out of a store without being stopped means nothing about whether you will be charged.
• The first contact may arrive weeks later, as a knock at the door or a letter telling you when to appear. People who assume the silence means it went away miss their first court date, and that is a far worse problem than the shoplift.

There are three realistic endings for an ordinary first case. You plead guilty. The district attorney continues the case and dismisses it after you complete conditions. Or the judge grants judicial diversion under Penal Code 1001.95. The full mechanics of all three are set out on our petty theft page.

Here is the part that surprises people. The money and the work are close to identical across all three.

• Judicial diversion: about $150 in diversion fees.
• District attorney continuance: usually a $150 donation to Victim Witness.
• Probation after a guilty plea: a $150 state restitution fine, plus roughly $100 in court fees.

In all three you should expect a four hour online theft class and somewhere around 20 hours of community service. Restitution to the store is on top, and depends on what was taken.

So the choice is not between an expensive path and a cheap one. It is between doing the same class, the same hours and roughly the same money with a conviction and a probation term attached, or doing it without either. That is why “just plead guilty and get it over with” is such a poor trade. You pay the same price and keep the record.

Which of the three you get is decided long before anyone stands up in court. The clients who do best have already started counseling, already finished the online class, already logged community service hours, and already paid restitution back before the first real conversation with the prosecutor. That work is what a judge is being asked to reward.

The more dangerous version of a shoplifting case is not the one with an expensive item in it. It is the one with a date range.

Stores review video backwards. When they find the same person on several visits, the district attorney can add those separate incidents together, including incidents at different stores, and charge the total as one ongoing theft. Once the combined figure clears $950, Penal Code 490.3 allows the case to be charged as a felony.

And here is the consequence nobody tells people: once that happens, diversion is no longer available at all. Not judicial diversion, not a continuance. The path that resolves almost every ordinary first case is simply gone.

This is why a second or third visit to the same store is not three times the trouble. It is a different kind of trouble. It is also why the timing of a call matters so much. A case that is still being reviewed is a case where the date range has not been written yet.

Separate from anything a court does, the store can bar you from its property. In Orange County these bans typically run two to five years, and they are issued constantly, sometimes to people who were never cited for anything.

The trap is what happens next. This office has seen a client who was told by a store that it would not press charges for a theft offense, but the client was banned from the property, and later walked back in to do ordinary shopping. He was arrested for trespassing.

If you have been handed a notice like this, or were told not to come back, treat it as binding and tell your attorney about it. A trespassing arrest on top of a pending theft case removes most of the room a defense lawyer has to work with.

The most common mistake is procedural rather than dramatic.

Consider someone who walks into a store, looks around, behaves in a way that makes a loss prevention officer suspicious, takes nothing, and leaves. A report gets written. A charge under 459.5 gets filed. But the element the prosecutor has to prove is intent at the moment of entry, and that case may not be provable at all.

An attorney who reads the charge and skips the report negotiates from a position that assumes guilt. The first question on any 459.5 is not what the client should plead to. It is whether entry with intent can be proven, and the answer is in the report, the video and what the client is alleged to have been carrying.

Most first offenses resolve. Some cases do not, and it is better to know that at the beginning.

If a person returns to the same store repeatedly over weeks or months and the combined total runs into the thousands, the picture changes. A felony in the $3,000 to $4,000 range can sometimes be brought back down to a misdemeanor, and this office has done it by getting restitution paid in full before the negotiation. But the odds are genuinely poor, and above a certain point they run out.

At that level the work shifts. The goal becomes reducing exposure, protecting a professional license or immigration status, and keeping a custody sentence off the table, rather than chasing a dismissal that is not there.

Orange County shoplifting cases are filed at the justice center covering the city where the store is, which is why two people arrested on the same afternoon can have very different experiences.

• Shoplifting cases out of the Irvine Spectrum are heard at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach.
• Cases from the Brea Mall go to the North Justice Center in Fullerton.
• The large format stores in Fountain Valley and Huntington Beach feed the West Justice Center in Westminster.

Timelines differ between them as well. Arrest to arraignment on a theft case typically runs about 45 days, and if the district attorney does not file within that window the notice to appear can show up three to four months later. From arraignment, a diversion usually takes six months to a year with a progress review partway through, and a district attorney continuance generally runs three to six months.

In most theft cases our attorneys appear for the client at the arraignment and at every pretrial hearing, and a diversion can often be completed without the client ever setting foot in the courtroom.

• Say nothing further. Not to loss prevention, not to the store’s investigator, not to an officer who calls. A handwritten statement given in a back room is routinely the strongest piece of evidence in the file.
• Do not go back to the store to return the item or pay for it. It feels like fixing the problem. It confirms possession and it confirms that you left without paying.
• Do not ignore the demand letter that arrives two or three weeks later from the store’s legal department. Ignoring it can turn into a civil judgment on your credit. It is negotiable, and it can be resolved in a way that does not amount to an admission in the criminal case.
• Start the work now. The online theft class and community service hours carry far more weight completed before a court date than ordered after one.
• Bring every prior, including old cases you believe were dismissed or expunged. Whether 666.1 is on the table is the first thing that has to be answered.

The Law Offices of Bryan R. Kazarian  handles theft and shoplifting cases throughout Orange County from our office in Santa Ana. If you have been cited, arrested, or contacted by a store investigator, you can schedule a consultation or call (855) 918-4253.