California Court of Appeal

Conviction for petty theft is affirmed, where: 1) the evidence that defendant forgot about the hoodie was insufficient to support an instruction on the defense of mistake of fact; 2) defendant's act of forgetting about the hoodie did not amount to a mistaken belief in a set of circumstances which, if true, would have made his act of walking out of the store with it lawful; and 3) even if there had been sufficient evidence to support an instruction on the defense of mistake of fact, the trial court did not have a duty to instruct on the defense sua sponte, or on any other defense that served only to negate the intent element of the charged crime, including defendant's true defense that he simply forgot about the hoodie.

Appellate Information

• Decided 04/04/2013
• Published 04/04/2013

Judges

• KING

Court

• California Court of Appeal

Counsel