What Happens When You Are Charged With Shoplifting

If you are screened eligible, you may qualify for a Diversion. This means taking your charge out of the criminal justice system and dealing with it in some other non-criminal fashion.

In shoplifting, when a person has no prior criminal history, has never been charged with this kind of offence before, where the figure is relatively small, and where there is not a coordinated, complex sophisticated element to the crime, a person will likely be considered eligible for Diversion. Depending on the court house, the program will have different consequences.

The most common is to ask you to make a charitable donation. The amount is often a multiple of what they say you stole. In a very simple example, if you have stolen $50 worth of items, you might be told to make a donation to any Canadian registered charity in the amount of a $100 or $150—2 to 3 times the amount of the item allegedly taken. Once you show proof of the donation, the court will withdraw the charge for Diversion. You do have to accept responsibility for what you have done, so although you are not entering a formal guilty plea and there will not be any criminal record or finding of guilt against you, you will be required to sign a document with the Diversion Program Coordinator that records your admission of wrongdoing. They will retain that document, not the police and not the court. If you are ever referred for Diversion again, they will have the records saying that this person has already had their “free pass” and you won’t be deemed eligible again except in extraordinary circumstances.

Sometimes, instead, the court will ask you to do community service. The number of hours is also related to the value of what was stolen. Some court houses have also developed shoplifting programs. These are particularly useful and we use some private ones in addition to the ones that have been developed by the court houses themselves. We will sometimes place clients in a private clinic when it appears that there is an underlying psychological problem that gives rise to the shoplifting scenario. This is helpful to the person who has been charged three or four times and for whom the Crown no longer takes the easy view. It’s a question of getting to the root of the problem and ensuring that it won’t happen again. These programs deal with the psychological issues underlying the crime.

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If you, or someone you care about, is dealing with criminal law issues in the Toronto,Ontario Region, contact Adler Bytensky Prutschi for a consultation.