7 ms·

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

64 points by hugh-avherald 8y ago

zui 8y ago
Edge cases ...
- afoot 8y ago
  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.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    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.
  - robbick 8y ago
    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
Doncametic 8y ago
What are the odds. Interesting case, thanks for the read :)
- afoot 8y ago
  Surprisingly high. 350k people born per day - just takes one of them to break the law on a particular day and get caught.
  - dis-sys 8y ago
    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.
mehrdadn 8y ago
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?
- frgewut 8y ago
  But then your birthday date would fluctuate.
  - mehrdadn 8y ago
    I meant for the purposes of settling this issue, not for all legal calculations based on birthdays.
    - maccard 8y ago
      But then you're in a funny gray area of being legally an adult for some considerations, but not others.
      - mehrdadn 8y ago
        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.
- da_murvel 8y ago
  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.
jen729w 8y ago
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 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).
- lathiat 8y ago
  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.
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    (ii) explicitly states at the end of the month, which unambiguously specifies that the period ends when the month does. (i) uses “immediately before” language because it is referencing the numerically corresponding day of the next calendar month after the start day. In both cases they seem to be taking the simplest unambiguous description.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  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.
supernes 8y ago
It'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.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  If there was an election on the 28th of Feb 2018, would this girl have been able to vote? How about buy alcohol? If we agree there has to be some arbitrary line, then we probably ought to apply that sharply. > it indirectly implies that their client will likely be found culpable. I don't think that's fair at all. We don't know the specifics of the case. > if the defendant is found guilty there is a likelihood that their punishment This assumes that punishment, as dealt out by the courts, is an appropriate way of going about healing society after a crime has occurred.
  - jMyles 8y ago
    > This assumes that punishment, as dealt out by the courts, is an appropriate way of going about healing society after a crime has occurred. Yes, goodness gracious, how has this of all things become the sacrosanct, canonical representation of justice? More humane societies will follow ours, and they'll look back with astonishment about our obsession with punishment to the exclusion of actual restoration.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
aaron695 8y ago
Why 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.
natmaka 8y ago
According 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.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  Doesn't this just divert the decision making process to the PostgreSQL developers.
  - ptman 8y ago
    Or possibly the sql standard
  - anarazel 8y ago
    And we largely defer it to https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones ;)
noobermin 8y ago
This really goes against what the spirit of these sorts of laws should be. The 18 barrier to age of majority is treated as a threshold, sure, but the reality of people is they mature in different ways and over longer periods of time. I (and my culture I guess) considered myself an adult by 16 or 17 whilst friends I know didn't consider themselves adults until 22 or 23. The thing I know is under the law, everyone needs to be held to the same standard, but does a day an adult make? Is that seriously the argument they make there? Biologically and psychologically, we know that a day doesn't age someone, maturation occurs on a longer timescale. The thing is 18 as a threshold is not as important as how responsible, aware, and independent a person is. I know that's a harder thing to measure, but when we confuse the map for the territory, instead of actually using the law as intended, we play these weird legal games.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  I'm 34 and still don't consider myself an adult. With this in mind, if I break the law can I please be tried as a minor?
  - noobermin 8y ago
    This logic is not applicable linearly across all ages I think.
emilfihlman 8y ago
I absolutely don't see the issue here. The suspect was not 18 at the time of the crime.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  It's not difficult, is it? I'm not sure why there's any debate whatsoever.
  - bonzini 8y ago
    Unfortunately, legal definitions can have counterintuitive consequences. The article is saying that the justices disagree on when you become an adult. One justice is saying that you become an adult 18 years after you're born, but how are years defined by the law? It could be defined as "365 days, or 366 days if the time period starts after February 28th of a year preceding a leap year". Instead, the law first defines "N months" to always end on the last day of the final month if there aren't enough days in that final month, and then a year is simply 12 months. This is actually sensible. If you enter a 1-year contract on Feb 29th, it makes sense that it ends on Feb 28th rather than Mar 1st the next year. Therefore you become an adult 216 months after you're born, which in the case of this girl happened on the last day of February 2018 (because February 29th 2018 didn't exist). I agree that this is a problem, but if the problem lies in the law's definition of "becoming adult", it might not even be possible for judges to fix it. Assuming it is actually possible for them to fix it, the alternative definition could have been "on the day of your 18th birthday", but really you need a more precise the definition actually must accommodate February 29th and push it to March 1st. For example, as the other justice puts it, "until your 18th birthday has begun or passed" (as if February 29th 2018 existed but was of length zero). Of course you'd have to find out whether any other laws are in conflict with this definition, and possibly fix all the computer programs that were assuming the old definition (for example, would she have voted on February 28th 2018? would that change with the new definition?). BTW at least in Italy, if the justices reach parity they have to judge in favor of the defendant. In that case she would be declared not an adult. But the ancillary question of e.g. elections would not be resolved.
knorthfield 8y ago
I just hope the crime was underage drinking. Drinking age is 18 in Australia FYI.
- bonzini 8y ago
  In that case the court would be arguing that she could not have drunken on February 28th, and the lawyer would be arguing that she could have.
k_bx 8y ago
"The tyrrany of the discontinuous mind" by Richard Dawkins sums it up quite nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttUxingKt90 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttUxingKt90
brassattax 8y ago
Did anyone catch the stock photo and caption used on the article? That an extra 30th day was "added to February in the year the girl was born". LOL
benmmurphy 8y ago
i would think that on non-leap years you would 'age' on the 1st of March. but i can see where the confusion lies. for days before Feb 29th you get to the next year by adding 365 days on years except the leap year. so for 2000-2004. [366, 365, 365, 365] for days after Feb 29th you get to the next year by adding 365 days on years except the year before the leap year. so for 2004-2004. [365, 365, 365, 366] if you use one of these rules for Feb 29th you get the next year falling on Feb 28th or Mar 1st for non-leap years..

64 points by hugh-avherald 8y ago

zui 8y ago

Edge cases ...

afoot 8y ago
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.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  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.
- robbick 8y ago
  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

Doncametic 8y ago

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

afoot 8y ago
Surprisingly high. 350k people born per day - just takes one of them to break the law on a particular day and get caught.
- dis-sys 8y ago
  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.

mehrdadn 8y ago

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?

frgewut 8y ago
But then your birthday date would fluctuate.
- mehrdadn 8y ago
  I meant for the purposes of settling this issue, not for all legal calculations based on birthdays.
  - maccard 8y ago
    But then you're in a funny gray area of being legally an adult for some considerations, but not others.
    - mehrdadn 8y ago
      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.
da_murvel 8y ago
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.

jen729w 8y ago

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 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).

lathiat 8y ago
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.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  (ii) explicitly states at the end of the month, which unambiguously specifies that the period ends when the month does. (i) uses “immediately before” language because it is referencing the numerically corresponding day of the next calendar month after the start day. In both cases they seem to be taking the simplest unambiguous description.
jacquesm 8y ago
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.

supernes 8y ago

It'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.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
If there was an election on the 28th of Feb 2018, would this girl have been able to vote? How about buy alcohol? If we agree there has to be some arbitrary line, then we probably ought to apply that sharply. > it indirectly implies that their client will likely be found culpable. I don't think that's fair at all. We don't know the specifics of the case. > if the defendant is found guilty there is a likelihood that their punishment This assumes that punishment, as dealt out by the courts, is an appropriate way of going about healing society after a crime has occurred.
- jMyles 8y ago
  > This assumes that punishment, as dealt out by the courts, is an appropriate way of going about healing society after a crime has occurred. Yes, goodness gracious, how has this of all things become the sacrosanct, canonical representation of justice? More humane societies will follow ours, and they'll look back with astonishment about our obsession with punishment to the exclusion of actual restoration.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago

aaron695 8y ago

Why 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.

natmaka 8y ago

According 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.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
Doesn't this just divert the decision making process to the PostgreSQL developers.
- ptman 8y ago
  Or possibly the sql standard
- anarazel 8y ago
  And we largely defer it to https://www.iana.org/time-zones https://www.iana.org/time-zones ;)

noobermin 8y ago

This really goes against what the spirit of these sorts of laws should be. The 18 barrier to age of majority is treated as a threshold, sure, but the reality of people is they mature in different ways and over longer periods of time. I (and my culture I guess) considered myself an adult by 16 or 17 whilst friends I know didn't consider themselves adults until 22 or 23. The thing I know is under the law, everyone needs to be held to the same standard, but does a day an adult make? Is that seriously the argument they make there? Biologically and psychologically, we know that a day doesn't age someone, maturation occurs on a longer timescale. The thing is 18 as a threshold is not as important as how responsible, aware, and independent a person is. I know that's a harder thing to measure, but when we confuse the map for the territory, instead of actually using the law as intended, we play these weird legal games.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
I'm 34 and still don't consider myself an adult. With this in mind, if I break the law can I please be tried as a minor?
- noobermin 8y ago
  This logic is not applicable linearly across all ages I think.

emilfihlman 8y ago

I absolutely don't see the issue here. The suspect was not 18 at the time of the crime.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
It's not difficult, is it? I'm not sure why there's any debate whatsoever.
- bonzini 8y ago
  Unfortunately, legal definitions can have counterintuitive consequences. The article is saying that the justices disagree on when you become an adult. One justice is saying that you become an adult 18 years after you're born, but how are years defined by the law? It could be defined as "365 days, or 366 days if the time period starts after February 28th of a year preceding a leap year". Instead, the law first defines "N months" to always end on the last day of the final month if there aren't enough days in that final month, and then a year is simply 12 months. This is actually sensible. If you enter a 1-year contract on Feb 29th, it makes sense that it ends on Feb 28th rather than Mar 1st the next year. Therefore you become an adult 216 months after you're born, which in the case of this girl happened on the last day of February 2018 (because February 29th 2018 didn't exist). I agree that this is a problem, but if the problem lies in the law's definition of "becoming adult", it might not even be possible for judges to fix it. Assuming it is actually possible for them to fix it, the alternative definition could have been "on the day of your 18th birthday", but really you need a more precise the definition actually must accommodate February 29th and push it to March 1st. For example, as the other justice puts it, "until your 18th birthday has begun or passed" (as if February 29th 2018 existed but was of length zero). Of course you'd have to find out whether any other laws are in conflict with this definition, and possibly fix all the computer programs that were assuming the old definition (for example, would she have voted on February 28th 2018? would that change with the new definition?). BTW at least in Italy, if the justices reach parity they have to judge in favor of the defendant. In that case she would be declared not an adult. But the ancillary question of e.g. elections would not be resolved.

knorthfield 8y ago

I just hope the crime was underage drinking. Drinking age is 18 in Australia FYI.

bonzini 8y ago
In that case the court would be arguing that she could not have drunken on February 28th, and the lawyer would be arguing that she could have.

k_bx 8y ago

"The tyrrany of the discontinuous mind" by Richard Dawkins sums it up quite nicely https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttUxingKt90 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttUxingKt90

brassattax 8y ago

Did anyone catch the stock photo and caption used on the article? That an extra 30th day was "added to February in the year the girl was born". LOL

benmmurphy 8y ago

i would think that on non-leap years you would 'age' on the 1st of March. but i can see where the confusion lies. for days before Feb 29th you get to the next year by adding 365 days on years except the leap year. so for 2000-2004. [366, 365, 365, 365] for days after Feb 29th you get to the next year by adding 365 days on years except the year before the leap year. so for 2004-2004. [365, 365, 365, 366] if you use one of these rules for Feb 29th you get the next year falling on Feb 28th or Mar 1st for non-leap years..