Utrecht criminal court dismisses coat theft charge over lack of proof of intent

The Criminal court in Utrecht has dismissed the theft charge against Bram Verhoeven, finding that prosecutors proved he took a coat from a café but not that he knew it belonged to someone else. The court rejected the prosecution’s request for a conviction and a modest fine.

The dispute turned on the difference between a deliberate theft and a mistaken removal from a shared coat rack. A silent recording established the taking; it did not resolve what Verhoeven understood when he left with the coat.

The court treated the taking as established because both sides accepted what the recording showed. But proof of that observable act was not enough: the prosecution also had to establish knowing wrongdoing through reliable evidence. Verhoeven did not have to prove that a mix-up occurred.

The prosecutor’s report that the owner said the coat was missing did not close that gap. No statement from the owner or independent record of that account was produced. The submission supported that a coat had been reported missing, not what Verhoeven knew when he took it.

An original phone photograph dated two weeks before the incident showed Verhoeven wearing a dark, knee-length coat with a broadly similar outline. Small details could not reliably be compared. The court gave the photograph weight only as evidence that he owned a similar coat—not that the coats were identical or that he had made a mistake.

Nor did the absence of an immediate explanation or return establish his knowledge at the time. The court stressed that the defence account was argument, not independent testimony about his state of mind. Its rejection of conviction therefore rested on a failure of proof, not a finding that the taking was accidental.

The prosecution relied on the recording of Verhoeven taking the coat and leaving, together with the reported missing-coat claim. It sought a conviction and a modest fine, without specifying an amount.

The defence accepted the taking but disputed the inference of theft. It argued that the photograph made confusion plausible and that the silent footage could not establish whether Verhoeven recognised the coat as another person’s property. It acknowledged that neither an explanation at the rack nor an immediate return appeared in the record, and that the photograph could not itself prove a mix-up.

The case arose after Verhoeven removed a dark coat from a café’s shared rack and left. The supplied account also described him putting a hand into a pocket and pausing, but the silent footage did not reveal what he touched or read. Whether other black coats were on the rack remained unknown.

The dismissal leaves the competing explanations unresolved. The court made no finding that a mix-up actually happened; it found that the required intent had not been proved on this record. No fine or payment between the parties was ordered.