People v. Morton

This court now answers for the first time a question old in New York law. May a husband be convicted of the crime of larceny (Penal Law, § 1290) for appropriating the separate property of his wife? Put another way, the question is this: did the various Married Women’s Acts enacted, revised and codified between 1848 and 1909 and now appearing as sections 50 and 51 of the Domestic Relations Law, which give married women the right to own property and to sue and be sued with respect thereto, abrogate, without any corresponding change in the larceny law, the settled common-law rule that there…