Criminal Law People v. Navarro L.A. County Superior Court, Appellate Department 1979 Facts: The (D) was walking in front a job site and he notice several beams laying disheveled across each other. He took four of the beams and he was convicted of petty theft. Issue: If you do not have the criminal intent to steal can you still be convicted of theft. Rule: Even if the a persons; intent may not be reasonable, a person cannot be held liable for a crime if the intent was genuinely not manifested toward committing a crime. Felonious intent is an essence of the crime of larceny. Where the law requires a specific criminal intent, it is not enough merely to prove that a reasonable man would have that intent, without meeting the burden of proof that the defendant himself also entertains it. Reasoning: The court held that defendant's good faith did not have to be objectively reasonable, as the trial court had instructed. The court ruled that defendant's good faith could have been objectively unreasonable, but he would nevertheless have been entitled to an acquittal because the state failed to prove that defendant entertained the specific intent to steal the beams. The court found that had the jury concluded that defendant's belief was unreasonable, it could have inferred that he did not in good faith hold his belief.