Your record says petty theft. TCK 142/2-h says five to ten years.

TCK 141 defines basic theft in a single sentence: taking movable property belonging to another from where it is, without the possessor's consent, in order to obtain a benefit for oneself or another. One to three years.

TCK 142 then lists the circumstances that raise the range, in two tiers. The first, TCK 142/1, runs three to seven years. The second, TCK 142/2, runs five to ten. Subparagraph (h) sits in the second tier, and it has two limbs:

• property left in a place that anyone may enter, but locked; or
• property kept inside a building or its annexes.

One range, two very different situations. The first limb catches a locked bicycle on a public street, a locked car in an open car park, a padlocked container on a building site. The second catches almost anything taken from inside a building — a shop, a hotel room, a storeroom, a warehouse, a stairwell.

The words doing the work in the second limb are muhafaza altına alınmış — kept, or placed under protection. It is not self-evident that a jacket on an open rail, in a shop whose doors stand open to the street, is under protection in any ordinary sense. That is precisely the argument. It is still worth understanding why the article gets written anyway.

The Code grades theft by the protection that had to be defeated, not by what the item was worth. Look one tier down: under TCK 142/1-e, property left in the open by custom, by allocation or by the requirements of its use carries three to seven years. Property inside a building carries five to ten. On that logic the building is the protection — the walls, the doors, the tills, the staff — and a shelf inside it is a stored place rather than an open one. Applying (h) to goods taken from inside shops and supermarkets is common enough that a prosecutor drafting the first record will usually reach for it without pausing.

Which means the characterisation is fixed early, on a short record, by someone who has not heard your account. Contesting it is a written argument about where the goods sat, how the space was arranged, and what protection was actually defeated. It goes to the prosecutor before the indictment and to the court afterwards, and it is far easier to make while the shop's footage still exists.

One boundary should be noted, because people cross it without meaning to. If force or a threat is used against anyone — a hand pushed aside, a security guard shoved on the way out — the file leaves the theft chapter entirely and becomes robbery under TCK 148, at six to ten years. How that line is drawn is set out under robbery charges.

Mediation closes. CMK 253/1-b-6 puts theft under TCK 141 on the mediation list, expressly regardless of whether the offence depends on a complaint. It does not put TCK 142 there. Mediation is the one route that ends a theft file without a conviction, and subparagraph (h) removes it. In practical terms this is a larger consequence than the sentencing range itself.

Remand becomes realistic. CMK 100/3-a-8 names theft under articles 141 and 142 among the offences where, on strong suspicion resting on concrete evidence, a ground for remand may be presumed to exist. Beside it sits CMK 100/2-a, concrete facts raising a suspicion of flight. A defendant with a hotel booking and a return flight fits that description on paper under either article — but a five-year floor makes the proportionality test in CMK 100/1 much easier for a judge to pass. What follows from that, including the prohibition on leaving the country in CMK 109/3-a, is set out under remand and judicial control.

Deferral turns into an arithmetic problem. CMK 231, as amended in July 2026, allows the verdict to be deferred where the sentence imposed is two years or less, the defendant has no previous conviction for an intentional offence, the court is satisfied from his personality and his conduct at the hearing that he will not offend again, and the loss caused is made good in full by return, restoration or compensation; a five-year probation period follows. The third of those conditions, CMK 231/6-b, is the court's own assessment, so getting under the two-year line makes deferral possible rather than earned. From a one-year floor that ceiling is easy to reach. From a five-year floor it is reachable only on the best available reductions — see deferral and suspended sentences, and the section below.

Nothing in TCK 142 switches off the provisions that reduce. They apply to the aggravated forms as they apply to the basic offence, and in a shop file two of them carry most of the weight.

• TCK 145 — low value. Where the value of the property is low, the court may reduce the sentence and, taking the manner and features of the commission into account, may decline to impose a penalty at all. The article sets no monetary threshold and is not confined to TCK 141. Nothing follows automatically: the value has to be evidenced into the file, from the shop's own pricing, and the argument has to be made.
• TCK 168 — restitution, and the date. Making the victim's loss good in full, in kind or by compensation, cuts the sentence by up to two thirds if done before prosecution begins, and by up to one half if done after prosecution begins but before judgment. Partial restitution needs the victim's consent.
• TCK 35 — attempt. If the taking was begun with suitable acts but not completed for reasons outside your control, the sentence is reduced by one quarter to three quarters. Where possession actually changed — at the shelf, past the tills, through the doors — is a question of fact, answered from footage that gets overwritten.
• TCK 62 — discretion. Up to one sixth, for reasons including conduct after the act.

The arithmetic is worth doing once, because it shows what the timing is worth. Five years is sixty months. Full restitution before prosecution begins, at the ceiling of TCK 168/1, brings that to twenty months — inside the two-year line in CMK 231. The same restitution made after the indictment is accepted, at the ceiling of TCK 168/2, brings it to thirty months; even with the full one-sixth reduction under TCK 62 that is twenty-five months, and the two-year line is gone.

Those are ceilings, not entitlements. The Code says up to throughout, and the court fixes a figure within the band and gives reasons for it. But the gap between those two outcomes was not created by anything you did or failed to do. It was created by a date.

The characterisation, the value evidence and the timing of any restitution are all decided in the first weeks. The wider position — the order of proceedings, what is different for a foreign defendant, and the immigration file that runs on its own timetable — is set out on theft and shoplifting charges.