State v. Mann

The Salvation Army regularly collected donated clothes from a large, walled, floored, roofed, and securely locked tin donation shed. Eric Owen Mann and Mary Lou Mann (defendants) were caught stealing clothes from the shed and confessed to entering it for that purpose. The State of Arizona (plaintiff) charged them with third-degree burglary, defined as entering, with intent to steal, any walled, floored, and secured nonresidential structure used for storage. At trial, there was no factual dispute about the shed's physical features or its purpose, and the trial judge instructed the jury that, as a matter of law, the shed qualified as a "structure" under the statute. The Manns were convicted and appealed, arguing that whether the shed met the statutory definition should have gone to the jury as a question of fact, and that the shed was actually abandoned and unused.