One of the amusing Criminal Law undergraduate questions in Jurisprudence centres on the law of mistakes.

Suppose it is a rainy night, and I am in a restaurant without my umbrella which I lost the other week. After paying my bill I decide to chance it. I shiftily look around to see who is looking then grab an umbrella, any umbrella, from the rack and head off into the storm.

I am spotted by someone in the restaurant who thinks that I have stolen his umbrella. The police are called and quickly nab me. I am charged with stealing the umbrella. I am poised to confess…

Yet, mirabile dictu, it turns out that even though I thought I was stealing an umbrella belonging to someone else, I in fact had grabbed my own umbrella which had been handed in to the restuarant after I left it at a nearby bus stop last week.

So can I be convicted of theft or attempting to steal?

A twist on this one came in the famous case of Haughton v Smith. The police had intercepted a robbery and lay in wait for the gangsters coming to collect the stolen goods. They too were nabbed, and charged with attempted handling of stolen goods. They came up with a crafty defence – that the goods were no longer ‘stolen goods’ once they were under police control!

Lots of law in all this.

But one thing should be obvious enough.

Namely that when someone steals property and tries to sell it on, the person or organisation who buys that property knowing it to be stolen is in a false position.

Or not.

How about the case of Heinrich Keiber, who stole masses of Lichtenstein bank data and then sold it to various EU governments who were glad to have it to help investigate many suspected crimes?

A reader draws my attention to all this and asks:

1 – Given laws on the handling of stolen goods, by what means did governments justify buying the stolen information (not to mention the reselling to other nations)? One would assume that the correct approach would have been to apprehend the respective criminal. Instead, we have governments formally and publicly rewarding crime.

2 – If such justification exists, what else can a government so buy without apparently breaking the law? Stolen cars? Jewellery? Drugs? What are the boundaries?

3 – What democratic principles allow a government to have different laws than its citizens?

4 – If the above cannot be answered satisfactory, who will take responsibility for the legal consequences? Convictions on illegally obtained evidence are unsafe, and it would actually be worrying if they did succeed.

Don’t get me wrong, tax evasion is tax evasion, but this cure has some very dangerous consequences, and it fascinates me that nobody has picked this up..

Putting it another way, what are the limits on taxpayers’ money being used to incite dishonesty:

When an spy gets caught, selling private information he has to go to court, when an employee talks to the competitor, he/she gets fired and probably a law suite as a bonus. But when governments are doing it…. Well nothing happened.

Can we allow as citizens that government pays our tax money, which big part already goes to police and investigators, to spend on thieves? Can we allow that government spies on legal companies?

Does anyone have any answers?