Kidnapping
In criminal law, kidnapping is the unlawful carrying away and confinement of a person against their will. Thus, it is a composite crime, it can be defined as false imprisonment by means of abduction, both of which are separate crimes that when committed upon the same person merge as the single crime of kidnapping. The asportation/abduction element is but not conducted by means of force or fear; that is, the perpetrator may use a weapon to force the victim into a vehicle, but it is still kidnapping if the victim is enticed to enter the vehicle willingly, e.g. in the belief it is a taxicab. Kidnapping may be done to demand for ransom in exchange for releasing the victim, or for other illegal purposes. Kidnapping can be accompanied by bodily injury. Kidnapping of a child is known as child abduction, these are sometimes separate legal categories. Kidnapping of children is by one parent against the wishes of a parent or guardian. Kidnapping of adults is for ransom or to force someone to withdraw money from an ATM, but may be for the purpose of sexual assault.
In the past, presently in some parts of the world, kidnapping is a common means used to obtain slaves and money through ransom. In less recent times, kidnapping in the form of shanghaiing men was used to supply merchant ships in the 19th century with sailors, whom the law considered unfree labour. Criminal gangs are estimated to make up to $500 million a year in ransom payments from kidnapping. Kidnapping has been identified as one source by which terrorist organizations have been known to obtain funding; the Perri and MacKenzie article identified "tiger" kidnapping as a specific method used by either the Real Irish Republican Army or Continuity Irish Republican Army, in which a kidnapped family member is used to force someone to steal from their employer. Bride kidnapping is a term applied loosely, to include any bride "abducted" against the will of her parents if she is willing to marry the "abductor", it still is traditional amongst certain nomadic peoples of Central Asia. It has seen a resurgence in Kyrgyzstan since the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent erosion of women's rights.
Express kidnapping is a method of abduction used in some countries from Latin America, where a small ransom, that a company or family can pay, is demanded. Tiger kidnapping is taking a hostage to make a loved one or associate of the victim do something: e.g. a child is taken hostage to force the shopkeeper to open the safe. The term originates from the long preceding observation, like a tiger does on the prowl. Kidnapping that does not result in a homicide is a hybrid offence that comes with a maximum possible penalty of life imprisonment. A murder that results from kidnapping is classified as 1st-degree, with a sentence of life imprisonment that results from conviction. Article 282 prohibits hostaging. Part 1 of Article 282 allows sentencing kidnappers to maximum imprisonment of 8 years or a fine of the fifth category. Part 2 allows maximum imprisonment of 9 years or a fine of the fifth category if there are serious injuries. Part 3 allows maximum imprisonment of 12 years or a fine of the fifth category if the victim has been killed.
Part 4 allows sentencing people. Part 1, 2 and 3 will apply to them. Kidnapping is an offence under the common law of Wales. Lord Brandon said in 1984 R v D: First, the nature of the offence is an attack on, infringement of, the personal liberty of an individual. Secondly, the offence contains four ingredients as follows: the taking or carrying away of one person by another. In all cases of kidnapping of children, where it is alleged that a child has been kidnapped, it is the absence of the consent of that child, material; this is the case regardless of the age of the child. A small child will not have the understanding or intelligence to consent; this means. It is a question of fact for the jury whether an older child has sufficient understanding and intelligence to consent. Lord Brandon said: "I should not expect a jury to find at all that a child under fourteen had sufficient understanding and intelligence to give its consent." If the child did consent to being taken or carried away, the fact that the person having custody or care and control of that child did not consent to that child being taken or carried away is immaterial.
If, on the other hand, the child did not consent, the consent of the person having custody or care and control of the child may support a defence of lawful excuse. It is known as Gillick competence. Regarding Restriction on prosecution, no prosecution may be instituted, except by or with the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions, for an offence of kidnapping if it was committed against a child under the age of sixteen and by a person connected with the child, within the meaning of section 1 of the Child Abduction Act 1984. Kidnapping is an indictable-only offence. Kidnapping is punishable with fine at the discretion of the court. There is no limit on the fine or the term of imprisonment that may be imposed provided the sentence is not inordinate. A parent should only be prosecuted for kidnapping their own child "in exceptional cases
Assassination
Assassination is the act of killing a prominent person for either political, religious or monetary reasons. An assassination may be prompted by political or military motives, it is an act that may be done for financial gain, to avenge a grievance, from a desire to acquire fame or notoriety, or because of a military, insurgent or secret police group's command to carry out the homicide. Acts of assassination have been performed since ancient times; the word assassin is believed to derive from the word Hashshashin, shares its etymological roots with hashish. It referred to a group of Nizari Shia Muslims. Founded by Hassan-i Sabbah, the Assassins were active in the fortress of Alamut in Persia from the 8th to the 14th centuries, expanded by capturing forts in Syria; the group killed members of the Abbasid, Seljuq and Christian Crusader elite for political and religious reasons. Although it is believed that Assassins were under the influence of hashish during their killings or during their indoctrination, there is debate as to whether these claims have merit, with many Eastern writers and an increasing number of Western academics coming to believe that drug-taking was not the key feature behind the name.
The earliest known use of the verb "to assassinate" in printed English was by Matthew Sutcliffe in A Briefe Replie to a Certaine Odious and Slanderous Libel, Lately Published by a Seditious Jesuite, a pamphlet printed in 1600, five years before it was used in Macbeth by William Shakespeare. Assassination is one of the oldest tools of power politics, it dates back at least as far as recorded history. In the Old Testament, King Joash of Judah was recorded as being assassinated by his own servants. Chanakya wrote about assassinations in detail in his political treatise Arthashastra, his student Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Maurya Empire made use of assassinations against some of his enemies, including two of Alexander the Great's generals and Philip. Other famous victims are Philip II of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great, Roman consul Julius Caesar. Emperors of Rome met their end in this way, as did many of the Muslim Shia Imams hundreds of years later; the practice was well known in ancient China, as in Jing Ke's failed assassination of Qin king Ying Zheng in 227 BC.
Whilst many assassinations were performed by individuals or small groups, there were specialized units who used a collective group of people to perform more than one assassination. The earliest were the sicarii in 6 A. D. who predated the Middle Eastern assassins and Japanese ninjas by centuries. In the Middle Ages, regicide was rare in Western Europe, but it was a recurring theme in the Eastern Roman Empire. Blinding and strangling in the bathtub were the most used procedures. With the Renaissance, tyrannicide—or assassination for personal or political reasons—became more common again in Western Europe. High medieval sources mention the assassination of King Demetrius Zvonimir, dying at the hands of his own people, who objected to a proposition by the Pope to go on a campaign to aid the Byzantines against the Seljuk Turks; this account is, contentious among historians, it being most asserted that he died of natural causes. The myth of the "Curse of King Zvonimir" is based on the legend of his assassination.
In 1192, Conrad of Montferrat, the de facto King of Jerusalem, was killed by an assassin. The reigns of King Przemysł II of Poland, William the Silent of the Netherlands, the French kings Henry III and Henry IV were all ended by assassins. In the modern world, the killing of important people began to become more than a tool in power struggles between rulers themselves and was used for political symbolism, such as in the propaganda of the deed. In Russia alone, two emperors, Paul I and his grandson Alexander II, were assassinated within 80 years. In the United Kingdom, only one Prime Minister has been assassinated—Spencer Perceval on May 11, 1812. In Japan, a group of assassins called the Four Hitokiri of the Bakumatsu killed a number of people, including Ii Naosuke, the head of administration for the Tokugawa shogunate, during the Boshin War. Most of the assassinations in Japan were committed with bladed weaponry, a trait, carried on into modern history. A video-record exists of the assassination of Inejiro Asanuma.
In the United States, within 100 years, four presidents—Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy—died at the hands of assassins. There have been at least 20 known attempts on U. S. presidents' lives. Huey Long, a Senator, was assassinated on September 10, 1935. Robert F. Kennedy, a Senator and a presidential candidate, was assassinated on June 6, 1968 in the United States. In Austria, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, carried out by Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian national and a member of the Serbian nationalist insurgents, is blamed for igniting World War I after a succession of minor conflicts, while belligerents on both sides in World War II used operatives trained for assassination. Reinhard Heydrich died after an attack by British-trained Czechoslovak soldiers on behalf of the Czechoslovak government in exile in Operation Anthropoid, knowledge from decoded transmissions allowed the United States to carry out a targeted attack, killing Japanese Admiral
Sodomy
Sodomy or buggery is anal or oral sex between people or sexual activity between a person and a non-human animal, but it may mean any non-procreative sexual activity. The term sodomy, derived from the story of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis, was restricted to anal sex. Sodomy laws in many countries criminalized the behavior. In the Western world, many of these laws have been overturned or are not enforced; the term is derived from the Ecclesiastical Latin peccatum Sodomiticum or "sin of Sodom", which in turn comes from the Ancient Greek word Σόδομα. Genesis tells how God wished to destroy the "sinful" cities of Gomorrah. Two angels are invited by Lot to take refuge with his family for the night; the men of Sodom surround Lot's house and demand that he bring the messengers out so that they may "know" them. Lot protests that the "messengers" are his guests and offers the Sodomites his virgin daughters instead, but they threaten to "do worse" with Lot than they would with his guests; the angels strike the Sodomites blind, "so that they wearied themselves to find the door."
In current usage, the term is used in law. Laws prohibiting sodomy were seen in past Jewish and Islamic civilizations, but the term has little modern usage outside Africa and the United States; these laws in the United States have been challenged and have sometimes been found unconstitutional or been replaced with different legislation. Many cognates in other languages, such as French sodomie, Spanish sodomía, Portuguese sodomia, are used for penetrative anal sex, at least since the early nineteenth century. In those languages, the term is often current vernacular and a formal way of referring to any practice of anal penetration. In modern German, the word Sodomie has no connotation of anal or oral sex and refers to bestiality; the same goes for the Polish sodomia. The Norwegian word sodomi carries both senses. In Danish, sodomi is rendered as "unnatural carnal knowledge with someone of the same sex or with animals". In Arabic and Persian, the word for sodomy, لواط, is derived from the same source as in Western culture, with much the same connotations as English.
Its direct reference is to Lot and a more literal interpretation of the word is "the practice of Lot", but more it means "the practice of Lot's people" rather than Lot himself. The word sod, a noun or verb used as an insult, is derived from sodomite, it is a general-purpose insult term for anyone the speaker dislikes without specific reference to their sexual behaviour. Sod is considered mildly offensive. However, in New Zealand and Australia it is not considered offensive at all, but only'coarse', because it is locally assumed if incorrectly, that it refers to'sod' as in a wet clump of dirt. While religion and the law have had a fundamental role in the historical definition and punishment of sodomy, sodomitical texts present considerable opportunities for ambiguity and interpretation. Sodomy is both an imagined category. In the course of the eighteenth century, what is identifiable as sodomy becomes identified with effeminacy, for example, or in opposition to a discourse of manliness. In this regard, Ian McCormick has argued that "an adequate and imaginative reading involves a series of intertextual interventions in which histories become stories and reconstructions in lively debate with, around,'dominant' heterosexualities...
Deconstructing what we think we see may well involve reconstructing ourselves in surprising and unanticipated ways." The modern English word "bugger" is derived from the French term bougre, that evolved from the Latin Bulgarus or "Bulgarian". The Catholic Church used the word to describe members of a religious sect known as the Bogomils, who originated in medieval Bulgaria in the 10th Century and spread throughout Western Europe by the 15th Century; the Church used it as a term of offence against a group they considered heretical. The first use of the word "buggery" appears in Middle English in 1330 where it is associated with "abominable heresy"; the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology quotes a similar form: "bowgard", but claims that the Bulgarians were heretics "as belonging to the Greek Church, sp. Albigensian". Webster's Third New International Dictionary gives the only meaning of the word "bugger" as a sodomite, "from the adherence of the Bulgarians to the Eastern Church considered heretical".
Bugger is still used in modern English as an exclamation while "buggery" is synonymous with the act of sodomy. In the Hebrew Bible, Sodom was a city destroyed by God because of the evil of its inhabitants. No specific sin is given as the reason for God's great wrath; the story of Sodom's destruction — and of Abraham's failed attempt to intercede with God and prevent that destruction — appears in Genesis 18-19. The connection between Sodom and homosexuality is derived from the described attempt by a mob of the city's people to rape L
Defamation
Defamation, vilification, or traducement is the communication of a false statement that harms the reputation of, depending on the law of the country, an individual, product, government, religion, or nation. Under common law, to constitute defamation, a claim must be false and must have been made to someone other than the person defamed; some common law jurisdictions distinguish between spoken defamation, called slander, defamation in other media such as printed words or images, called libel. False light laws protect against statements which are not technically false, but which are misleading. In some civil law jurisdictions, defamation is treated as a crime rather than a civil wrong; the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled in 2012 that the libel law of one country, the Philippines, was inconsistent with Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as urging that "State parties should consider the decriminalization of libel". In Saudi Arabia, defamation of the state, or a past or present ruler, is punishable under terrorism legislation.
A person who defames another may be called a "defamer", "libeler", "slanderer", or a "famacide". The term libel is derived from the Latin libellus; as of 2017, at least 130 UNESCO Member States retained criminal defamation laws. In 2017, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Office of the Representative on Freedom of the Media issued a report on criminal defamation and anti-blasphemy laws among its Member States, which found that defamation is criminalized in nearly three-quarters of the 57 OSCE participating States. Many of the laws pertaining to defamation include specific provisions for harsher punishment for speech or publications critical of heads of state, public officials, state bodies and the State itself; the OSCE report noted that blasphemy and religious insult laws exist in around one third of OSCE participating States. In Africa, at least four Member States decriminalized defamation between 2012 and 2017; the ruling by the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights in Lohé Issa Konaté v. the Republic of Burkina Faso set a precedent in the region against imprisonment as a legitimate penalty for defamation, characterizing it as a violation of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the treaty of the Economic Community of West African States.
Countries in every region have moved to advance the criminalization of defamation by extending legislation to online content. Cybercrime and anti-terrorism laws passed throughout the world have led to bloggers appearing before courts, with some serving time in prison; the United Nations, OSCE, Organisation of American States and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights Special Rapporteurs for Freedom of Expression stated in a joint declaration in March 2017 that ‘general prohibitions on the dissemination of information based on vague and ambiguous ideas, including "false news" or "non-objective information", are incompatible with international standards for restrictions on freedom of expression...and should be abolished.’ The common law origins of defamation lie in the torts of "slander" and "libel", each of which gives a common law right of action. Defamation is the general term used internationally, is used in this article where it is not necessary to distinguish between "slander" and "libel".
Libel and slander both require publication. The fundamental distinction between libel and slander lies in the form in which the defamatory matter is published. If the offending material is published in some fleeting form, as by spoken words or sounds, sign language, gestures or the like it is slander. Libel is defined as defamation by written or printed words, pictures, or in any form other than by spoken words or gestures; the law of libel originated in the 17th century in England. With the growth of publication came the growth of libel and development of the tort of libel. An early example of libel is the case of John Peter Zenger in 1735. Zenger was hired to publish New York Weekly Journal; when he printed another man's article that criticized William Cosby, British Royal Governor of Colonial New York, Zenger was accused of seditious libel. The verdict was returned as Not Guilty on the charge of seditious libel, because it was proven that all the statements Zenger had published about Cosby had been true, so there was not an issue of defamation.
Another example of libel is the case of New York Times Sullivan. The U. S. Supreme Court overruled a State court in Alabama that had found The New York Times guilty of libel for printing an advertisement that criticized Alabama officials for mistreating student civil rights activists. Though some of what The Times printed was false, the Court ruled in its favor, saying that libel of a public official requires proof of actual malice, defined as a "knowing or reckless disregard for the truth". There are several things. In the United States, a person must prove that 1) the statement was false, 2) caused harm, 3) was made without adequate research into the truthfulness of the statement; these steps are for an ordinary citizen. For a celebrity or public official, a person must prove the first three steps, that the statement was made with the intent to do harm or with reckless disregard for the truth, specifically referred to as "actual malice". At one time, the honour of peers was protected
Adultery
Adultery is extramarital sex, considered objectionable on social, moral, or legal grounds. Although what sexual activities constitute adultery varies, as well as the social and legal consequences, the concept exists in many cultures and is similar in Christianity and Judaism. A single act of sexual intercourse is sufficient to constitute adultery, a more long-term sexual relationship is sometimes referred to as an affair. Many cultures have considered adultery to be a serious crime. Adultery incurred severe punishment for the woman and sometimes for the man, with penalties including capital punishment, mutilation, or torture; such punishments have fallen into disfavor in Western countries from the 19th century. In most Western countries, adultery itself is no longer a criminal offense, but may still have legal consequences in divorce cases. For example, in fault-based family law jurisdictions, adultery always constitutes a ground for divorce and may be a factor in property settlement, the custody of children, the denial of alimony, etc.
Adultery is not a ground for divorce in jurisdictions. In some societies and among certain religious adherents, adultery may affect the social status of those involved, may result in social ostracism. In countries where adultery is a criminal offense, punishments range from fines to caning and capital punishment. Since the 20th century, criminal laws against adultery have become controversial, with international organizations calling for their abolition in the light of several high-profile stoning cases that have occurred in some countries; the head of the United Nations expert body charged with identifying ways to eliminate laws that discriminate against women or are discriminatory to them in terms of implementation or impact, Kamala Chandrakirana, has stated that: "Adultery must not be classified as a criminal offence at all". A joint statement by the United Nations Working Group on discrimination against women in law and in practice states that: "Adultery as a criminal offence violates women’s human rights".
In Muslim countries that follow Sharia law for criminal justice, the punishment for adultery may be stoning. There are fifteen countries in which stoning is authorized as lawful punishment, though in recent times it has been carried out only in Iran and Somalia. Most countries that criminalize adultery are those where the dominant religion is Islam, several Sub-Saharan African Christian-majority countries, but there are some notable exceptions to this rule, namely Philippines and several U. S. states. In some jurisdictions, having sexual relations with the king's wife or the wife of his eldest son constitutes treason. By analogy, in cultures which value and practice exclusive interpersonal relationships, sexual relations with a person outside the relationship may be described as infidelity or cheating, is subject to sanction; the term adultery refers to sexual acts between a married person and someone, not that person's spouse. It may arise in family law. For instance, in the United Kingdom, adultery is not a criminal offense, but is a ground for divorce, with the legal definition of adultery being "physical contact with an alien and unlawful organ".
Extramarital sexual acts not fitting this definition are not "adultery" though they may constitute "unreasonable behavior" a ground of divorce. The application of the term to the act appears to arise from the idea that "criminal intercourse with a married woman... tended to adulterate the issue of an innocent husband... and to expose him to support and provide for another man's ". Thus, the "purity" of the children of a marriage is corrupted, the inheritance is altered; some adultery laws differentiate based on the sex of the participants, as a result such laws are seen as discriminatory, in some jurisdictions they have been struck down by courts on the basis that they discriminated against women. The term adultery, rather than extramarital sex, implies a moral condemnation of the act. Adultery refers to sexual relations which are not legitimized. In the traditional English common law, adultery was a felony. Although the legal definition of adultery differs in nearly every legal system, the common theme is sexual relations outside of marriage, in one form or another.
In archaic law, there was a tort of adultery, called criminal conversation, "conversation" being an old expression for sexual intercourse. This tort has been abolished in all jurisdictions. Traditionally, many cultures Latin American ones, had strong double standards regarding male and female adultery, with the latter being seen as a much more serious violation. Adultery involving a married woman and a man other than her husband was considered a serious crime. In 1707, English Lord Chief Justice John Holt stated that a man having sexual relations with another man's wife was "the highest invasion of property" and claimed, in regard to the aggrieved husband, that "a man cannot receive a higher provocation"; the Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert, Vol. 1 equated adultery to theft writing that, "adultery is, after homicide, the most punishable of all crimes, because it is
Obscenity
An obscenity is any utterance or act that offends the prevalent morality of the time. It is derived from the Latin obscaena a cognate of the Ancient Greek root skene, because some offensive content, such as murder or sex, was depicted offstage in classical drama; the word can be used to indicate a strong moral repugnance, in expressions such as "obscene profits" or "the obscenity of war". As a legal term, it refers to graphic depictions of people engaged in sexual and excretory activity. In the United States of America, issues of obscenity raise issues of limitations on the freedom of speech and of the press, which are otherwise protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Federal obscenity law in the U. S. is unusual in. Former Justice Potter Stewart of the Supreme Court of the United States, in attempting to classify what material constituted "what is obscene," famously wrote, "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced... ut I know it when I see it...."
In the United States, the 1973 ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States in Miller v. California established a three-tiered test to determine what was obscene—and thus not protected, versus what was erotic and thus protected by the First Amendment. Delivering the opinion of the court, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote: The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct defined by the applicable state law. While most recent obscenity cases in the United States have revolved around images and films, the first obscenity cases dealt with textual works; the classification of "obscene" and thus illegal for production and distribution has been judged on printed text-only stories starting with "Dunlop v. U. S. 165 U. S. 486", which upheld a conviction for mailing and delivery of a newspaper called the'Chicago Dispatch,' containing "obscene, lewd and indecent materials", upheld in several cases.
One of these was "A Book Named John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney General of Com. of Massachusetts, "383 U. S. 413" written by John Cleland c. 1760, was judged to be obscene in a proceeding that put the book itself on trial rather than its publisher. Another was "Kaplan v. California, 413 U. S. 115" whereby the court most famously determined that "Obscene material in book form is not entitled to any First Amendment protection because it has no pictorial content." In 2005, the U. S. Department of Justice formed the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in a push to prosecute obscenity cases. Red Rose Stories, a site dedicated to text-only fantasy stories, became one of many sites targeted by the FBI for shutdown; the government alleged. The publisher pleaded guilty. Extreme pornographer Max Hardcore served 30 months of a 46-month prison sentence for obscenity. Many U. S. states have had bans on the sale of sex toys, regulating them as obscene devices. Some states have seen their sex toy bans ruled unconstitutional in the courts.
That ruling leaves only Mississippi and Virginia with current bans on the sale of obscene devices. Literature communicating contraceptive information was prohibited by several states; the last such prohibition, in Connecticut, was overturned judicially in 1965. In 1957, two associates of acclaimed poet Allen Ginsberg were arrested and jailed for selling his book "Howl and Other Poems" to undercover police officers at a beatnik bookstore in San Francisco; the California Supreme Court declared the literature to be of "redeeming social value" and therefore not classifiable as "obscene". Because the poem "Howl" contains pornographic slang and overt references to drugs and homosexuality, the poem was censored and confiscated. FCC v. Pacifica better known as the landmark "seven dirty words" case. In that ruling, the Court found that only "repetitive and frequent" use of the words in a time or place when a minor could hear can be punished. In State v. Henry, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the Oregon state law that criminalized obscenity was an unconstitutional restriction of free speech under the free speech provision of the Oregon Constitution, with the ruling making Oregon the "first state in the nation to abolish the offense of obscenity."
In Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court struck down indecency laws applying to the Internet. In Miller v. California - the currently-binding Supreme Court precedent on the issue - the Court ruled materials were obscene if they appealed, "to a prurient interest", showed "patently offensive sexual conduct", defined by a state obscenity law, "lacked serious artistic, political, or scientific value." Decisions regarding whether material was obscene should be based on local, not national, standards. Standards superseded by the Miller Test include: Wepplo: If material has a substantial tendency to deprave or corrupt its readers by inciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desires.. Hicklin test: the effect of isolated passages upon the most susceptible persons. (British common law, cited in Regina v. Hicklin, 1868. LR 3 QB 360 - overturned when Michigan
Robbery
Robbery is the crime of taking or attempting to take anything of value by force, threat of force, or by putting the victim in fear. According to common law, robbery is defined as taking the property of another, with the intent to permanently deprive the person of that property, by means of force or fear. Precise definitions of the offence may vary between jurisdictions. Robbery is differentiated from other forms of theft by its inherently violent nature. Under English law, most forms of theft are triable either way, whereas robbery is triable only on indictment; the word "rob" came via French from Late Latin words of Germanic origin, from Common Germanic raub -- "theft". Among the types of robbery are armed robbery, which involves the use of a weapon, aggravated robbery, when someone brings with them a deadly weapon or something that appears to be a deadly weapon. Highway robbery or mugging takes place outside or in a public place such as a sidewalk, street, or parking lot. Carjacking is the act of stealing a car from a victim by force.
Extortion is the threat to do something illegal, or the offer to not do something illegal, in the event that goods are not given using words instead of actions. Criminal slang for robbery includes "blagging" or "stick-up", "steaming". In Canada, the Criminal Code makes robbery an indictable offence, subject to a maximum penalty of life imprisonment. If the accused uses a restricted or prohibited firearm to commit robbery, there is a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for the first offence, seven years for subsequent offences. Robbery is a statutory offence in the Republic of Ireland, it is created by section 14 of the Criminal Justice Act, 2001, which provides: A person is guilty of robbery if he or she steals, before or at the time of doing so, in order to do so, uses force on any person or puts or seeks to put any person in fear of being and there subjected to force. Robbery is a statutory offence in Wales, it is created by section 8 of the Theft Act 1968 which reads: A person is guilty of robbery if he steals, before or at the time of doing so, in order to do so, he uses force on any person or puts or seeks to put any person in fear of being and there subjected to force.
Aggravated theft Robbery is the only offence of aggravated theft. Aggravated robbery There are no offences of aggravated robbery; this requires evidence to show a theft as set out in section 1 of the Theft Act 1968. In R v Robinson the defendant threatened the victim with a knife in order to recover money which he was owed, his conviction for robbery was quashed on the basis that Robinson had an honest, although unreasonable, belief in his legal right to the money. See R v Skivington 1 QB 166, 2 WLR 655, 131 JP 265, 111 SJ 72, 1 All ER 483, 51 Cr App R 167, CA. In R v Hale the application of force and the stealing took place in different locations, it was not possible to establish the timing, it was argued that the theft should be regarded as complete by this time, R v Gomez, should apply. The threat or use of force must take place before or at the time of the theft. Force used after the theft is complete will not turn the theft into a robbery; the words "or after" that appeared in section 23 of the Larceny Act 1916 were deliberately omitted from section 8.
The book "Archbold" said that the facts in R v Harman, which did not amount to robbery in 1620, would not amount to robbery now. It was held in R v Dawson and James that "force" is an ordinary English word and its meaning should be left to the jury; this approach was confirmed in Corcoran v Anderton, both handbag-snatching cases. Stealing may involve a young child, not aware that taking other persons' property is not in order; the victim must be placed in apprehension or fear that force would be used before or at the time of the taking of the property. A threat is not immediate. Robbery occurs if an aggressor forcibly snatched a mobile phone or if they used a knife to make an implied threat of violence to the holder and took the phone; the person being threatened does not need to be the owner of the property. It is not necessary that the victim was frightened, but the defendant must have put or sought to put the victim or some other person in fear of immediate force; the force or threat may be directed against a third party, for example a customer in a jeweller's shop.
Theft accompanied by a threat to damage property will not constitute robbery, but it may disclose an offence of blackmail. Dishonestly dealing with property stolen during a robbery will constitute an offence of handling. Robbery is an indictable-only offence. Under current sentencing guidelines, the punishment for robbery is affected by a variety of aggravating and mitigating factors. Important is how much harm was caused to t
