On Liability for Misappropriation of Property Belonging to the Spouses’ Community Property

The legal assessment of misappropriation of property belonging to community property by one of the spouses constitutes a heavily contested issue in criminal law. The article analyzes a well-established opinion, according to which such property can be the object of the crime of misappropriation, and which cites the rules of the civil law. The article focuses on the issue of the possibility of assuming in such cases an attack on property, i.e. a violation of the object of the offence, discussed from the perspective of family law, which allows spouses to dispose of such property without the permission of the other spouse, on the basis of the rule of independent property management. Moreover, the author verifies the prerequisite for the seizure of third-party property, given that the property in question belongs also to the defendant, in accordance with the rules of community property. In addition to that, the author discusses the issue of meeting the prerequisites for the subjective aspect and the rule for evaluating the damage inflicted by the offence. The latter issue has been identified as particularly controversial, given that determining the scope of the possible restitution claims according to the value of property which constitutes the object of the offence in a situation where the property belongs also to the defendant is contrary to the intuition of criminal law scholars