You seem to be inventing legal terms and ideas like an improvisational poet ("authority of agency over the comatose"????).

How could that possibly help?

As that wikipedia article explains Agency is a commercial law concept. It has nothing to do with the prosecution of crimes under criminal law. Also "authority of agency" isn't a legal term. Which is why you'll find no results on google scholar. Agents have a scope of authority-- but nobody calls this "authority of agency" and furthermore your concept of an "authority of agency" for reporting a crime isn't a thing. (You'd have to actually read the results that come up on google scholar to confirm this as putting in direct quotes in google turns up results that don't contain that exact actual quote.)

Furthermore you know you are just making things up, why not just concede you like to imagine how criminal law works and you are having fun making up things like "authority of agency"?

Or perhaps you think i'm a very stupid person and treating you unfairly, maybe you can educate me by finding a reference for your claim that "In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something"

I suspect your source was your impression of law and order episodes, but even if I'm wrong it seems unfair for you to demand evidence from others without providing any yourself. I look forward to being educated by how you know "In the United States you can’t be arrested and charged with theft without the owner claiming you actually stole something".

This seems to be a crazy claim on it's face, since, as I explained, the owner of the object might be dead, in a coma, an infant, being threatened by the mob not to testify, etc. And the concept of hostile witnesses also exists in criminal law.

Ok you’re being rude.

First, my wife is a lawyer.

Second, I pasted that link because I thought you didn’t know what “agency” meant based on your non-sequitur response. As in “principal” and “agent”.

I never claimed that was a legal term. If you are an agent with authority, what would you call it? Power of attorney doesn’t apply here. In general, someone that acts on the behalf of another. That’s it. No one is inventing new words. That’s just how grown-ups talk.

Ergo. If the owner is dead, then someone else is the owner. If the person in a coma, someone else can legally act on their behalf, like a spouse or family member. You know, someone with authority. Acting on behalf, like an agent. There’s those poetic words again! Same applies to an infant. Understood?

Finally, the point I was making is that someone has to report the crime and demonstrate that theft actually occurred for a successful prosecution. You are extremely unlikely to get arrested, much less prosecuted, for openly hypothesizing about whether a theoretical crime took place. Which is the very topic we were originally discussing.

I was fast and loose with the word “owner” because I thought my audience would understand the broader definition. Apparently “agent” doesn’t t work for you either, but whatever you want to call it, I hope for your sake that it’s been made more clear.

I’ve already clarified my position once, and now ad nauseum. I don’t know what else to say if you’re still confused.

Maybe you should ask your wife, because as I understand it the prosecution has to prove a crime occurred beyond a reasonable doubt, that's the legal standard, it's the same standard as in Britain as I understand it. You seem to think that someone with some sort of legal authority on behalf of the victim has to testify that the item was in fact the victim's and was stolen-- this is not correct, it can be proven beyond a reasonable doubt with any admissible evidence. Or maybe you agree with me and we are talking past each other, I don't know?

To go back to the Doctor Who example, there's clearly concern by the archivists that admissible evidence exists to show the film was stolen by them. Whether this is likely to be prosecuted and conviction is likely to occur is a different matter.

No, you’re making assertions I didn’t claim. You have to demonstrate that a theft occurred. A theft, by definition, requires a claim of ownership. An owner. Without a claim of ownership, there is no crime because you can trivially argue it was a gift or abandoned property.

Again you are making things up. A defense attorney is welcome to argue (for example) that the guy who battered me unconscious with a baseball bat on the security footage and took my wallet was actually "gifted" my wallet, or the wallet was actually "abandoned" by my unconscious self, but nobody has to testify as to the ownership of my wallet for a successful prosecution. The jury as finder of fact has sufficient evidence from the security footage alone.

Of course I have no idea what you think you mean by "claim of ownership" at this point- courts make ruling based on "admissible evidence" as I said. There is no legal requirement for the evidence to be a "claim of ownership".

Feel free to have last word if you want, this conversation has gotten silly.

Yeah your whole counter argument is basically “nuh-uh”. Let’s go with the wallet analogy, subtraction out the unrelated battery part. Let’s say someone straight up pick pocketed your wallet, you didn’t know, and someone else reported it. The perp gets arrested. One of the three things will happen next:

1. You are informed of the theft. You confirm that the wallet is yours and perp is charged.

2. You are informed of the theft. Instead you claim that it was not stolen because you either don’t care, feel bad for the perp, you hated that wallet anyway, or any other reason. There is no case. One rando stranger’s word against another, the perp walks.

3. You are not informed of the theft. No one can prove that the wallet was stolen, because we find ourselves back in situation #2.