Who is the Victim When a Defendant Steals a Decedent’s Personal Property?

When a defendant steals personal property that belonged to someone who recently died, who should be alleged as the victim in the criminal pleading? I’ve been asked this question several times, so I thought I would try to answer it here on the blog. When the taking and the death are part of a single criminal transaction. When a victim is murdered and his or her property is taken in a single criminal transaction, the decedent is the proper person to be named as the owner of the property even though he or she may technically have been deceased at the moment of the taking. Cf. State v. Powell, 299 N.C. 95 (1980) (the defendant raped and murdered the victim, then took her television and automobile “as an afterthought once the victim had died”; this was not sufficient to support a conviction of armed robbery but did show that the defendant “committed the crime of [l]arceny”). The remainder of this post addresses the situation where the taking and the death are not part of a single criminal transaction, e.g., when a person dies of a heart attack on Monday and someone steals the person’s lawnmower on Tuesday. Not the deceased. It is not proper to allege that the victim is the deceased person. He or she is no longer capable of owning property. See Lucas Martin & Karen Schulz, Am. Jur. Larceny § 114 (“[O]n the theory that death terminates ownership, an indictment or information is . . . not good [...]