Does the Value of What Was Taken reduce a robbery sentence?

The provision is short. Under TCK 150/2, where the value of the property that is the subject of the yagma is low, the sentence may be reduced by one third to one half. There is no second sentence, no schedule, and no figure. Three things follow from that, and each of them disappoints someone.

• There is no threshold in the Code. No lira amount, no multiple of anything, nothing that applies of itself. Whether a value counts as low is decided by the court on the facts of the file.
• The reduction is discretionary. The word is may. A court that accepts the value was low is still not obliged to reduce, and one that reduces may stop at one third rather than one half.
• The floor is one half. Not an acquittal, not a discharge, not a file that ends.

That last point is where the comparison with theft matters, and where most of the confusion comes from. In a theft file, TCK 145 allows the court to reduce the sentence and, taking the manner and features of the commission into account, to decline to impose a penalty at all. That door does not exist in yagma. If you have been reading about theft and shoplifting charges in Türkiye and expecting the same treatment, the two provisions read alike and are not alike: one can end in no sentence, the other cannot go below half.

The more common misunderstanding is that a small amount taken must be a small offence. It is not, because value plays no part in choosing the article.

What separates yagma from theft is compulsion. TCK 148 requires that the property was handed over, or its taking not resisted, because of force or a threat of immediate and serious harm to person or property. TCK 148/3 counts as force any means that leaves the victim unable to know what is happening or to defend themselves. Nothing in that turns on what the thing was worth. The practical consequence is a gap that has nothing to do with the item.

Low value changes none of what follows the article either. Yagma is heard by the agir ceza panel under Law no. 5235, article 12, whatever the item was worth. It sits on the detention catalogue at CMK 100/3-a-8, alongside theft. Mediation under CMK 253 covers theft under TCK 141 and does not cover yagma, so there is no route by which a complainant can simply withdraw. And where there is more than one incident, TCK 43/3 excludes yagma from the chain-offence rule: three small takings are three sentences added together, not one sentence increased.

Because the reduction is a fraction of a long starting point, what it is worth depends on what else is in the file. The base range under TCK 148 is six to ten years. Taking the minimum, and applying the maximum of every reduction in turn:

Read that for what it is: a best case in which a court grants the top of every discretion it holds, from the lowest point of the range. It is not a forecast. But it shows why TCK 150/2 rarely decides a yagma file on its own. Alone, from six years, it produces three years — above the two-year ceiling that governs both suspension of the sentence and deferral of the verdict, set out on suspended sentences and HAGB. Value becomes decisive only in combination, and the other half of the combination is almost always restitution made early.

Under TCK 168/3 that timing is priced. Making the victim's loss good in full before prosecution begins allows a reduction of up to one half; the same act after the indictment is accepted allows up to one third. Where restitution is only partial, TCK 168/4 also requires the victim's consent. And from a qualified charge under TCK 149, where the range is ten to fifteen years, halving the minimum still leaves five. Where TCK 149 is on the file, the argument that matters is not the value but whether the qualifying circumstance is really there.

Value is a question of proof, and in most files it is proved badly. The figure that ends up in the judgment usually comes from the complainant's own statement in the first hours, given from memory, sometimes in a currency converted twice on the way into the record. Nobody contests it, because at that stage nobody is arguing about sentence yet.

• Fix the value at the date of the offence, with a document: a receipt, a bank record, a listing for the same model, an insurance schedule. A handset described as new in a statement is often four years old.
• Watch the currency. A visitor's account given in euros, converted at the time of the statement and again at the hearing, inflates a figure without anyone intending it.
• Separate what was taken from what was recovered. Property returned at the scene or recovered intact goes to TCK 168/3 as well as to the value.
• Put it in writing before judgment. Low value is not a point a court reaches unprompted; it is raised, evidenced, and answered.

If the value was argued and the judgment does not deal with it, that belongs to the istinaf and temyiz appeal routes rather than to a later repair. But the value argument is only one of the routes down that a yagma file has, and it works in sequence with the others — attempt, the debt-collection provision in TCK 150/1, effective remorse, discretionary mitigation — all of which are set out with their limits on the page on robbery charges under TCK 148 and 149.