Fine. Apologies for my unsanitized use of the word "justice." Your point is tangential to the issue being discussed.

Yes it is... But if I couldn't be a pedantic ass today I'd have nothing else to do.

As to the original point. I think the kids should get the same treatment other kids in the area get if they steal a bike. If the prosecutor usually does stuff like this then fine...

On the other hand... Maybe their defense lawyer got the prosecutor to agree not to press charges if they cooperated with the investigation. The kids would have been well within their rights to hand over the bike and say nothing.

Just got back from court when I saw how this thread has developed.

My point was the prevarication employed to justify stealing.

For me, bikes are almosts sacrosanct. You don't touch another person's bike just as you don't touch another person's spouse.

We have classes of individuals who are employable, at the low end, because they have cheap bikes as a form of transportation. One of the cycling magazines has commented about this growing group of people. Stealing an employed person's form of transportation as you carry around wire cutters is abominable.

Should the kids be exterminated? Of course not, but these kids seem like complete losers. And the bald-faced lie irritated me. Whether they should be prosecuted for petty larceny is a question of efficiency. However their parents should never let them forget it. How did the removal of the bike impact the search?

I suppose I just don't understand theft at all.

The law of abandoned property is helpful here. Where I live, something is abandoned if it is found under circumstances which would leave a reasonable person to believe that the true owner intended to renounce title to it. If all that is true, finders keepers applies.

The lock is pretty strong evidence that the owner intended to keep title. But what if I drove by the bike, locked up on a public bike rack, every day for a month. Every day for a year. At some point, the passage of time leads the reasonable person to believe that true owner is never coming back.

I would need to know more here. What was it chained to? How long was it there? What condition was it in? I can easily think of a hypothetical where one would be justified in cutting a lock and removing something that had been abandoned.

My sense here, however, is that it couldn't have been there long enough for that to be a reasonable conclusion. So either the kids are lying to cover up what amounts to a crime of opportunity, or they are profoundly stupid.

It had been there for about one day.

Seeing as how none of us have actually seen the bike, or the condition it was in (they claim it had two flat tires and looked beat up) I think it's a little absurd to immediately jump to the conclusion that it was obvious that it hadn't been abandoned. Maybe it really did look battered and abandoned.

I really cannot understand why everyone reads this article and suddenly has all the facts, knows that they're liars and thieves, and is ready to exact the maximum amount of punishment allowable. They made a mistake. I have no idea whether or not they took a bike that was obviously not abandoned or not, and I'm pretty sure nobody here knows that either. There are simply not enough facts in that article to be meriting this kind of reaction.

We know a few things.

They admitted to cutting the lock, something I'd never do unless it were my own bike.

A person rides her bike, locks it up and it's going to look beat up and abandoned after a day? Perhaps it was a beater bike but it sounds unlikely.

And let's put it this way, does a person steal a beater bike or something in reasonable condition? My experience tells me, beater bikes get left and good conditioned bikes are taken.

Well neither would I, but unless I missed something neither of us are a dumb impulsive teenage boy.

Since he was using it for parts to fix his own bike I doubt he was terribly concerned with what kind of condition the bike was in, and the fact remains that you simply DON'T KNOW whether or not the kid is really a thief, or just an idiot.

you believe him, that it was parts for his bike?

wow.

My speculation is that the kids brought the bike back only because they realized that it was connected to a missing person; they feared that they would appear to be involved in the girl's disappearance if their theft was discovered three months later.

When they cut the lock on another person's bike, they knew they were stealing.