It'd seem like we could resolve this by determining if the {mean # of days in a year} times 18 = 6574.365 days had passed or not?
But then your birthday date would fluctuate.
Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
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Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#12It'd seem like we could resolve this by determining if the {mean # of days in a year} times 18 = 6574.365 days had passed or not?
Exactly my thought. I don't know why anyone would use months or years as a measurement in legal and official terms, considering the variation of number of days they have.
Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#13I'm a marriage celebrant here in Australia and a couple must, by law, give "one month" notice before they wish to be married. This is surprisingly complicated. A good percentage of the training and the accreditation were related to the calculation of this month. The Attorney General's Department sent out a fact-sheet earlier this year, clarifying "one month" and giving a bunch of examples. A few months later they upd…
A typical case of making something more complex than needed. They could have simply used a window of time specified as no less than 30 days and no more than 45 days. That would have solved the problem in an elegant and robust way.
Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#14Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#15It's a fun problem to reason about mathematically, but it's totally irrelevant to the case in my opinion.
· Becoming an adult at 18.00 (vs. 17.98) years of age is a vague and somewhat arbitrary threshold. If we define it as "knowing right from wrong" and "knowing that your actions have consequences" in the context of the code of law, then a couple of days are not going to have a considerable impact.
· If the major distinction between being tried as a juvenile or an adult is the severity of the punishment and the amount of lenience applied, then it's telling for the attorney to argue for the former, since it indirectly implies that their client will likely be found culpable. Furthermore, if the defendant is found guilty there is a likelihood that their punishment will not be appropriate for their current age, which may seem unfair to some.
If it were up to me to decide, I would treat them as an adult for the purposes of the trial, but take into account their young age as an extenuating circumstance when sentencing.
Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#16Edge cases ...
Isn't it! I'd be surprised there isn't precedent somewhere actually, perhaps not in Australia but at least a couple of similar cases. The defendant in this case is absolutely 17 though. I can't see it any other way.
Agreed - in my mind the easiest way to consider it is to consider the 29th as an infinitesimally short day on non-leap years. On the 1st of March that day has passed and they are 18, on the 28th of Feb that day hasn't started.
The same tactic works for working out when one month from the 31st August is
Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#17Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
I meant for the purposes of settling this issue, not for all legal calculations based on birthdays.
But then you're in a funny gray area of being legally an adult for some considerations, but not others.
Er, that's not what I meant. By "this issue" I meant leap days. If there are no leap days causing issues then you use the normal calculation. If you're trying to figure out stop or end times on a leap day then you use this. It'd still be used for all considerations, so being legal age in all respects would be the same for the same person. The only "problem" is it discriminates by like 1 day for different people which hopefully we can still sleep soundly with.
Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#19Why would a prosecutor argue this other than to be personally evil? I assume to not bring it up would NOT set a precedent so the trail would just go on.
I see why the defense argues the opposite and how this is good, because the law must er on the defendants side.
But to fight this, to try and get a technicality over a "day" to decide if they are a child or adult shows a broken system.
The prosecutor should be "punished" in some way.
For the defense it costs them money at least, for the prosecutor it just costs the taxpayer money to be evil. There needs some sort of fix.
Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court
#20According to my experience PostgreSQL is very efficient at this game (and many other ones).
"select (date '2000-02-29' + interval '18 years')" returns "2018-02-28 00:00:00", so the Court may be right.