California v. Davis
Annotate this CaseIn February 2014, a jury found defendant Kenneth Davis guilty of two 2010 misdemeanors, diverting the natural course of a stream and petty theft (of water). It also found him guilty of a trespass injuring wood or timber in 2010 in another case (which was consolidated solely for purposes of trial) that involved a road he had bulldozed across neighboring property to his own. The court placed him on a three-year period of informal probation, conditioned on a 90-day jail term. Defendant appealed his conviction of petty theft of water, arguing there could not be a theft in this case as a matter of law because the natural stream at issue was nuisance groundwater that the owner was diverting from its property, and the State of California had only a regulatory interest in use of these public waters that otherwise were not personalty that can be the subject of a larceny. The Court of Appeal agreed that there could not be a simple larceny of uncaptured flowing water. The Court reversed and remanded for dismissal of that count.
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