As I wrote in September, I have been concerned about how the Virginia General Assembly has been changing the laws to allow criminal prosecutions over matters that are really just civil debt collections. The particular problem that I wrote about was a statute in Virginia — Va. Code §18.2-118 — that is being used by “rent-to-own” companies to threaten criminal prosecution of people who stop paying on their “rent-to-own” contracts. WWBT in Richmond did a story on this that came out yesterday.
In my client’s case, he paid on the contract for 5 months before he got into other criminal trouble; he moved from the apartment where the rent-to-own TV had been kept, and was arrested on other charges. He was in jail when the rent-to-own company sent him a letter — to the address that they knew was no good — demanding a return of the property. Not surprisingly, he didn’t get the letter; under the law, that meant that the law assumed that he stole the TV or intended to defraud the company.
I didn’t represent him at trial, so I didn’t have a chance to raise some important issues —
1. The rent-to-own contract called for what amounted to 93% annual interest for the three years. The contract was full of consumer finance violations, and could never have been enforced in a civil court. But he got 6 months for this criminal case.
2. The rent-to-own company should have been prosecuting him, if at all, under a different statute.
3. The law assumes that if you send a letter to someone and they don’t respond — even when you know before you send it that the letter will not be received — the other person is almost sure to be found to have acted fraudulently, no matter what the facts are. Is this fair? Does it make any sense at all?
The Virginia Supreme Court yesterday ducked some of the tough questions, throwing the case out on technical grounds. See McDowell v. Commonwealth.
