PETTY THEFT WITH A PRIOR

By Bob Walsh

For ages Petty Theft With A Prior was a felony in CA.  It was a very handy charge and could effectively deal with repeat commercial shop lifters.  In the wave of guilt and self-flagellation that went thru the formerly great state of California a few years back that crime went away, along with a lot of others, and a lot of bad things resulted.

There is a push cranking up in CA to re-create this crime as a felony, needed TWO priors rather than one to create the felony.  Retailers LOVE the idea.  It will be much harder politically for left-leaning DAs to continually flush felonies down the crapper than it is to do so to misdemeanors.  Now all they need is to get the misdemeanors charged in the first place (assuming the attempt is successful).