People v. Home Insurance

Supreme Court of Colorado
591 P.2d 1036, 1979 Colo. LEXIS 548, 197 Colo. 260 (1979)

ELI5:

Rule of Law:

Under a general theft statute, the unauthorized acquisition of confidential information, separate from any physical record, does not constitute theft of a 'thing of value' unless the legislature has specifically defined such information as property subject to theft.

Facts:

The defendants, an insurance company, hired an injury claims investigative service to obtain medical reports on two claimants.
An investigator for the service contacted a Denver hospital by telephone.
Through deceptive means over the phone, the investigator obtained a verbatim reading of the claimants' confidential medical reports.
The investigator transcribed the orally communicated medical information and sent the transcriptions to the defendants.
The actual physical medical records themselves never left the hospital's possession.

Procedural Posture:

The People charged the insurance company defendants with theft and related offenses in a Colorado trial court.
At the conclusion of the prosecution's case-in-chief, the trial court granted the defendants' motion to dismiss the charges.
The trial court dismissed the charges on the grounds that the medical information acquired was not a 'thing of value' under the theft statute.
The People, as the appellant, filed an appeal of the trial court's dismissal directly to the Colorado Supreme Court.

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Issue:

Does the surreptitious acquisition of confidential medical information, without the taking of the physical records, constitute a theft of a 'thing of value' as defined by the Colorado theft statute?

Opinions:

Majority - Justice Lee

No. The unauthorized acquisition of confidential medical information does not constitute theft of a 'thing of value' under the statute. Criminal statutes must be strictly construed in favor of the accused and cannot be expanded by interpretation. The statutory phrase 'intangible personal property' has traditionally been defined as property representative of value, such as stocks, bonds, and patents, not an abstract concept like confidentiality. The legislature has enacted specific statutes to criminalize the theft of other intangible information, such as trade secrets or wiretapped communications, demonstrating that if it intended to criminalize the taking of medical information, it would have done so explicitly. To rule otherwise would improperly expand the crime of theft to encompass civil wrongs like invasion of privacy or breaches of privilege, which was not the legislature's intent.

Analysis:

This decision reinforces the principle of strict construction in criminal law, limiting the judiciary's power to expand the scope of criminal statutes beyond their plain and traditional meaning. It establishes that for intangible concepts like information or confidentiality to be subject to general theft laws, a legislature must explicitly define them as 'property' or a 'thing of value.' This case distinguishes between civil wrongs (like invasion of privacy) and criminal theft, preventing the conflation of the two and requiring legislative clarity to create new categories of criminal property.

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