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Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court

abc.net.au

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Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court

#6

Post by jen729w »

I'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 updated the fact sheet: I think even they had messed it up first time round.

I'm pretty sure there's an Act which specifically defines this, and I think it goes back many decades. Alas, I can't be bothered finding it now because I have to go to the pub. ;-)

Edit: here we go. The marvellously named "Acts Interpretation Act" of 1901 (https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/C2016C00691).

2G Months

(1) In any Act, month means a period:

(a) starting at the start of any day of one of the calendar months; and

(b) ending:

(i) immediately before the start of the corresponding day of the next calendar month; or

(ii) if there is no such day—at the end of the next calendar month.

Example 1: A month starting on 15 December in a year ends immediately before 15 January in the next year.

Example 2: A month starting on 31 August in a year ends at the end of September in that year (because September is the calendar month coming after August and does not have 31 days).

Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court

#7

Post by DoctorOetker »

afoot wrote: post #3
zui wrote: post #2

Edge 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.

I also can't see it any other way. Also the birthday of a person doesnt even need to be near the potentially missing date for the same 'conundrum', two people a couple of years apart but otherwise the same birthday who comit a crime on the same day in july (but in different years), the day before they becomes 18, will also each have lived a different number of days. I think they should both be treated as not yet 18, even though they don't have the same age in days.

Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court

#8

Post by lathiat »

jen729w wrote: post #6

I'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…

Fascinating that they don't use the same "immediately before" language under (ii) - that seems to provide clarity that it's at the end of the day not the start of the day but no such clarify exists for (ii) though could probably be assumed.

Re: Juvenile or adult? Leap-year suspect poses conundrum for court

#10

Post by dis-sys »

afoot wrote: post #9
Doncametic wrote: post #4

What are the odds. Interesting case, thanks for the read :)

Surprisingly high. 350k people born per day - just takes one of them to break the law on a particular day and get caught.

I don't have the numbers for Australia/other western countries, but there are around 50,000 Chinese juveniles each year, to simplify the estimation, assuming birthday and when they commit their crimes are all evenly distributed during the year and there is no link between birthday and when/whether someone is going to be a criminal, you are looking at a few such cases a year in a country with 1.4 billion population.

the combined population of US/EU/AU/CA/NZ is close to the Chinese population, assuming the crime rate is the same (which is obviously not, thanks to the crime rate in US), you are look at a few such cases each year for the entire western world.

for australia, there were probably a few such cases after WWII.

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