The Wrong Good Deed by Caroline B. Cooney

Author:Caroline B. Cooney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

When she was safely home, needing no supper because of nibbling so much funeral food, and entirely lacking the energy to whip up peanut butter cookies, Clemmie gathered her courage.

What really happened to people who committed identity theft?

At the computer, she began exploring.

She turned up a law stating that it was criminal to “knowingly transfer or use, without lawful authority, a means of identification of another person with the intent to commit, or to aid or abet, any unlawful activity.”

She had not committed, aided, or abetted any unlawful activity by using Helen Stephens’s name. That wouldn’t make it legal, but it also did not seem to be a crime.

Another source said there had to be “harm” for the police to get involved. Nothing had harmed the real Helen, who had died more than a decade before Clemmie took her name. It had not harmed the real Helen’s family, who never knew. No bills had been sent to or paid by the real Stephens family; no assets taken from them.

She checked the various states in which she had lived and worked as Helen Stephens. Each one specified “criminal intent” as part of the charge in identity theft. Each state had its own definition of identity theft. She was glad she hadn’t ever taught school under a fake name in Louisiana, where she could be imprisoned with or without hard labor for not more than ten years.

She found no references to people who used another person’s name and social security numbers without intent to harm.

She had not stolen the real Helen’s papers; Helen had given them to her as part of a school assignment. A court might find that she should have returned those papers to Helen’s family. But she had been in grade school. Would they hold her responsible for failing to correct the situation when she became an adult?

In the search line, she typed: Does anybody actually go to jail for identity theft?

The top answer discussed the sad reality that law enforcement had limited resources to investigate and prosecute crimes. What to spend time on? They had to prioritize. Go after somebody who stole information from a mailbox and opened a credit card? Or go after a murderer? Invest weeks tracing a possible online scam? Or go after yet another murderer?

The murderer, said a police source, is always the right choice in that scenario.

This was not, in fact, comforting.

There was a murder in Clementine Lakefield’s past.

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