Reasons to be Accused of Burglary

(The content below was transcribed from an interview done with Acacia Law. We think you'll find it much easier
and more enjoyable to read this way.)

Interviewer: It sounds like burglary and trespass are just add-ons or thrown in, I guess for a variety of reasons, but for burglary you don't have to steal anything to be accused of burglary.

Acacia Law: Oh, no. In fact, you don't have to take a thing. They have secondary type situations. One example that I've run into is people may go into a structure and have what they might deem or when I say they I mean the police might deem are burglary tools. That can be something as simple as a screwdriver and a hammer. If you're on or inside another structure without permission and without legal authority and you possess say for example, a hammer, or a chisel, or a screwdriver, it doesn't matter if you've stolen anything, it doesn't matter if you've attempted to start defacing or destroying any property, in and of itself being there with those types of instruments gives rise to the suspicion that you are committing a burglary.

It's called, possession of burglary tools and it itself is also a felony. So what happens a lot of times is when I have clients come in and they have situations where they may have gone into a residential structure, committed some sort of crime, or intending to commit a crime, that is not related to theft, it's the fact that they have anywhere from one to three extra charges all relating to some form of burglary in the first or second degree or trespassing.

And, again, what these things do is they cause a stacking of the number of charges against an individual and the more felonies that you have charged against you, the more time you're looking at and the more serious your case becomes