Theft and Retail Fraud Attorney in Dearborn

The charge is about dishonesty, which is why it follows you

A theft case rarely turns on the jail exposure. A first-offense third-degree retail fraud carries up to 93 days, and almost nobody serves it. What does the damage is the word on the record. Theft is a crime of dishonesty, and background checks are read that way by employers, landlords, licensing boards, and immigration officers for the rest of your life.

That is the reason to treat even a small shoplifting charge as a case worth handling properly. The question is almost never whether you will go to jail. It is whether, five years from now, a background check shows a theft conviction.

Theft charges we defend

Charge	Statute	Threshold	Classification and maximum
Retail fraud, third degree	MCL 750.356d	Under $200	Misdemeanor, 93 days, $500 or 3x value
Retail fraud, second degree	MCL 750.356c	$200 to $1,000, or under $200 with a prior	Misdemeanor, 1 year, $2,000 or 3x value
Retail fraud, first degree	MCL 750.356c	$1,000 or more, or $200 to $1,000 with a prior	Felony, 5 years, $10,000 or 3x value
Larceny	MCL 750.356	Tiered from under $200 to $20,000 or more	93-day misdemeanor up to a 10-year felony
Larceny in a building	MCL 750.360	Any value	Felony, 4 years
Larceny from a motor vehicle	MCL 750.356a	Any value	Felony, 5 years
Receiving and concealing stolen property	MCL 750.535	Tiered by value	93-day misdemeanor up to a 10-year felony
Embezzlement	MCL 750.174	Tiered from under $200 to $100,000 or more	93-day misdemeanor up to a 20-year felony
Organized retail crime	MCL 752.1084	Acting with others, for resale	Felony, 5 years
Unlawfully driving away a motor vehicle	MCL 750.413	Any value	Felony, 5 years
Identity theft	MCL 445.65	First offense	Felony, 5 years, $25,000

Two features of Michigan theft law surprise people more than anything else on that table.

The first is larceny in a building. Take a $40 item from inside a building that is not a store open to the public, and the charge is a four-year felony under MCL 750.360, with no dollar threshold at all. The same $40 item from a store during business hours is a 93-day misdemeanor. The setting, not the value, decides.

The second is aggregation. Prosecutors can add together the value of separate thefts committed within a 12-month period to reach a higher degree. Three separate $400 incidents are not three misdemeanors; charged together they can become a first-degree felony. This is how a series of small incidents at the same store becomes a prison-exposure case.

Our guide to retail fraud degrees and penalties in Michigan walks through the dollar lines, the civil demand letter, and what happens after a stop in Dearborn in more detail.

Shoplifting at Fairlane and the 19th District Court

Most Dearborn theft cases we see began at Fairlane Town Center or at a store on Michigan Avenue or Ford Road. The pattern is consistent. Loss prevention stops you at the exit, holds you in a back office while Dearborn police are called, and you leave with an appearance ticket rather than in handcuffs. The case is then filed in the 19th District Court on Michigan Avenue, often under the city ordinance rather than the state statute.

Three separate things are now in motion, and most people only know about one.

• The criminal case. An arraignment date on the ticket, then a pretrial conference with the city prosecutor where the case is usually resolved. Our guide to what happens at an arraignment in Michigan covers that first appearance. Missing it produces a bench warrant.
• The civil demand letter. Under MCL 600.2953 the store can demand ten times the retail price of the goods, with a floor of $50 and a ceiling of $200, plus the full price of anything not recovered in sellable condition. It arrives from the store’s law firm within a week or two. Paying it does not end the criminal case, and what you write back can be used against you. Let your attorney answer it.
• The trespass notice. The store bans you from the property. It is not a court order, but violating it is its own charge.

The loss prevention file is where these cases are actually won or lost. Michigan’s shopkeeper’s privilege under MCL 600.2917 permits a detention only on reasonable cause and only for a reasonable time, and the recording, the incident report, and the receipt trail are frequently thinner than the charge assumes. We ask for all of it before the pretrial.

Keeping a theft charge off your record

There is no single mechanism for this. There are four, and which one fits depends on your age, your record, the court, and the prosecutor.

1. A plea to a non-theft offense. Where the prosecutor agrees, the charge is amended to something that is not a crime of dishonesty, such as disorderly conduct or trespass. For a client whose career depends on a clean dishonesty record, this is often worth more than a dismissal of a lesser charge.
2. A delayed sentence under MCL 771.1. The court delays sentencing for up to a year on conditions. Complete them and the case can end in dismissal, with no conviction entered.
3. The Holmes Youthful Trainee Act. For offenses committed between age 18 and the 26th birthday, with the prosecutor’s consent required from 21 up, HYTA keeps the proceedings off the public record and ends without a conviction if the terms are completed. See MCL 762.11.
4. A court diversion program. Some Wayne County district courts run first-offense theft diversion. Availability varies by court and by prosecutor, and it is not advertised.

All four have the same prerequisite: they are asked for before a plea is entered, by someone who knows which of them that particular court actually grants. After a guilty plea, the only remaining route is a set-aside under Michigan’s Clean Slate law, which means waiting years with the conviction on your record in the meantime.

Felony theft and embezzlement

Once the amount crosses $1,000, or the charge is larceny in a building, or there are prior theft convictions, the case is a felony and it moves differently. It starts in the district court with an arraignment and a probable cause conference, and if it is not resolved there it goes to a preliminary examination, where the prosecutor has to show probable cause before the case is bound over to the Wayne County Circuit Court. Our felony defense attorneys in Dearborn handle that track.

Embezzlement cases are their own category. They require a relationship of trust, an employee, an agent, a bookkeeper, a fiduciary, and they are usually built from documents rather than from a witness. The dollar tiers run high: $1,000 to $20,000 is a five-year felony, $20,000 to $50,000 is ten years, $50,000 to $100,000 is fifteen, and $100,000 or more is twenty. These cases frequently start as an internal audit and a forensic accountant’s report, and the defense often lives in the accounting rather than in the criminal law: whether the money was actually converted, whether authority existed, whether the loss figure is real. We review the books, not just the police report.

How we handle a theft case

One attorney handles the matter from the first call through resolution, in English and Arabic. Before the pretrial we pull the loss prevention report and any video, the police report, the receipt and inventory records that establish value, and your record, because the value and the record together set the degree and the degree sets everything else.

Then we tell you plainly which of the four record-protection routes is realistic in that court, what restitution will be, and what the matter is likely to cost. If the honest answer is that you should resolve the case quickly and inexpensively, that is what we will say.

Theft charges often arrive attached to something else. A stop that produced both a theft charge and a drug charge is handled with our drug possession lawyers in Dearborn. An altercation with loss prevention that became an assault allegation goes to our assault charge attorneys. Everything else sits with our criminal defense attorneys in Dearborn.

This is a focused part of our criminal defense practice. Call (313) 425-5555 or text (313) 362-6122 to talk through your situation.