$75,000 Felony Theft Charge Reduced to Minor Misdemeanor; Immigration Consequences Avoided

Our client — a long-time lawful permanent resident with no prior record — was accused by a corporate employer of a large-scale theft scheme. The case was formidable: the Commonwealth alleged that she was caught in possession of six stolen high-value smartphones and captured on surveillance stealing many more. All told, they alleged that she stole 54 phones valued at over $75,000. Worse, she confessed to the crime. A conviction carried not only the risk of a five-year prison sentence and a felony record, but serious immigration consequences for a non-citizen client.

What we did. Rather than treat the accusation as a foregone conclusion, we took the prosecution’s evidence apart piece by piece through pretrial motions:

• We attacked the valuation. The felony grade depended on the value of the property, an element the Commonwealth had to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. We showed that the government’s loss figures came from unsupported, internally inconsistent company paperwork — with no qualified witness able to establish the fair market value of the goods.

• We challenged the alleged confession. The claimed admission had been obtained through an unidentified, untrained interpreter in an unrecorded private interview. We moved to exclude it as unreliable and unable to be tested.

• We narrowed the case to what the evidence actually proved. We moved to limit the prosecution’s proof to the handful of items actually connected to our client, excluding a sprawling and prejudicial theory built on assumption rather than proof.

• We pressed the government’s discovery failures and preserved a motion for a required finding on the felony grade.

The result. After we presented our motions, the Commonwealth agreed to resolve the case as a minor misdemeanor — larceny under $1,200 — with no restitution and two years of unsupervised probation. The felony was gone, and, critically, the resolution was structured to avoid the immigration consequences that had threatened our client’s status in the United States.

Why it mattered. For a lawful permanent resident, the difference between a felony theft conviction and a carefully structured minor disposition can be the difference between staying with her family and facing removal. Careful, early motion practice — and attention to the immigration stakes at every step — made that difference here.