Is this really theft & Should she have been convicted?

Bit extreme but taking something that's not yours, and you know it, is theft.
The story also goes on to say that you have to take reasonable steps to find the owner. If you find a pound coin then there is no action to be taken. No one would report that. So you can keep it. Most people it says would go looking for a 20. As the bloke did. She should have handed it in to the store.
My mum found a 20 in the street and handed it in to local police station. 6 weeks later they rang her to go in and get it. No one went looking looking. in that case it became finders keepers.
Theft is theft after all

Theft is theft but bollux is also bollux. This is more of a case of finders keepers. In these cases the old woman should have been allowed to keep the money. If the original owner then finds out then the womayn should be given the opportunity to hand it back (within a reasonable time frame, 3 months for £20 is way beyond reasonable). Only then if the woman refused should she be liable to being a thief.

Not f'ing rocket science is it? But people still cant grasp such a concept.

A 23 year old woman found a £20 note on a shop floor, picked it up and put it in her pocket.
The owner had withdrew the money from a nearby cash point and when she lost it in the shop, the staff tried to help her find it but it was nowhere to be seen.

CCTV footage caught the woman pocketing the money. The manager recognised the woman because she was a regular customer.
3 months later, police arrived at her door and asked her to attend a police interview. There, she was shown the CCTV footage, she said that she didn't remember the incident but accepted that it was her.

The woman has no previous convictions, but was charged with theft at a magistrates court where she was given a 6 month conditional charge (meaning that she will not be punished as long as she doesn't get into any trouble for the next 6 months), and was required to pay £175 in court fees.
Do you think that this was fair?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4274126/Woman-convicted-picking-20-wants-turn-time.html?offset=0&max=100&jumpTo=comment-185127590&ito=rcreplyemail

Theft is theft but bollux is also bollux.

QFP.

Finders keepers as far as I'm concerned. However, if they insisted upon it, she could've simply been asked to give the woman £20.

Finders keepers doesn't exist in the eyes of the law.
Taking something that doesn't belong to you without the owners say so is always theft, regardless of how careless the owner may have been.

I agree though that she should have just been made to give the woman back her money, as it was such a minor offence

That's not strictly true. You can keep lost property if you've made reasonable effort to find the rightful owner. The police also give lost property to finders after about six weeks


Posted from TSR Mobile

What if the the £20 note was a free newspaper?

No, and I think her lawyer was less than useless TBH.
She should have claimed to have had an honest belief that she "appropriated the property in the belief that the person to whom the property belongs cannot be discovered by taking reasonable steps", and therefore to have not fulfilled the Mens Rea of dishonesty.

Yes that was the problem though due to court fees the woman didn't actually get a lawyer, she just pleaded guilty. If she had actually got a lawyer she would of almost certainly not been found guilty.