California Vehicle Code 10851 – Driving Without The Owner's Consent (Joy Riding)
This crime is charged throughout LA County when people are caught driving another person's car without permission. This can manifest itself in many different ways.
One common thing I've seen over the last twenty-five years is someone renting a car. Of course, at first, they have permission because the rental car agency permits them, and they sign all the papers and pay whatever money they have.
The problem occurs when they keep the car too long and don't return it when they're supposed to. At some point, the rental car company will call the police to say their vehicle was stolen. A lot of these cars are chipped, and the police can find them. Then, the person is arrested for Vehicle Code Section 10851—Driving Without the Owner's Consent or unlawful taking or driving of a vehicle.
At some point, the car owner can take their consent back if they gave it to you in the first place if you've kept the car too long in that scenario I just mentioned.
Joy Riding
Other scenarios can involve friends or family members giving somebody a vehicle or permitting the person and then taking the permission back for some reason—they get into an argument and get mad.
I've also seen boyfriend/girlfriend situations where one has leased a car for the other and then breaks up. The other person who has the car still wants to keep it but wants to avoid making the payments for it. Eventually, a police report is filed, and the person is arrested for joyriding.
So, if you have one of these joy-riding cases, you want to come in and sit down and provide all the details and facts about what happened. One big thing I see is that a lot of times, someone is arrested for taking the vehicle without the owner's consent, and only one version of events has been given to the police and the prosecutors.
So, they need to have the whole story about what happened. Once you get arrested and you have an attorney – if you hire that attorney and that attorney is given all the details by you – then we can often get the other version of events across to the prosecutors and usually work things out in the case.
Legal Defenses for Driving Without The Owner's Consent
One big defense in these cases is that you had consent to drive the vehicle. I've often seen people trying to return the consent when they cannot. If it's a husband and wife, it's all community property here in California, so no one can get any consent back once a vehicle is purchased with any funds from the community.
There are many other scenarios where people become angry at another person and try to take away their right to a vehicle that they're driving when they don't have the authority or the power to do it the right way lawfully.
But, of course, they give the police terrible information, so the police operating on that lousy information a lot of times will arrest people, and they really shouldn't have arrested them.
Again, that's where a reasonable criminal defense attorney comes in to argue the right things to either get the case dismissed or mitigated to something less. Other defenses are that you didn't know you were not permitted to drive a particular vehicle, which can spring from all different scenarios.
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Sometimes, somebody lets one person borrow their vehicle, and the person who borrows it thinks that the person who's giving it to him has lawful possession of the car when, in fact, they didn't have lawful possession.
Now, the police pull the vehicle over, run it, see that it's listed as stolen, and arrest the person driving the car. So, having a reasonable attorney to give your side of the story and your version of events and hopefully bring some evidence to bear on the issue can do wonders for you.
So, what I do in these unlawful taking of vehicle cases is I have the client come into the office, we sit down in the privacy of my law firm, and I have the client give me all the details about what happened. Please don't put any spin on it; don't omit anything.
Could you give me everything that happened, step by step? Then we can get down to the nitty-gritty as to whether or not you've got a defense to the joy-riding case. If you do, we will put the pieces in place to assert that defense, and if you don't, we will figure out a damage control plan to get this charge behind you as soon as possible.
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