Opinion ID: 2352128
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: application of principles of construction to the certified question

Text: The effect of the defendant's argument is that, in order for the statutory aggravating factor to apply, the victim would have to be murdered on the precise date of his or her fourteenth birthday or prior thereto. If the victim were murdered one day after his or her fourteenth birthday, the statute would not apply. This defies a common sense interpretation of the statute. In normal parlance, a person who has attained a certain birthday is known to be that age until that person's next birthday. Therefore, anyone who has attained his or her fourteenth birthday is known in common parlance to be fourteen years of age until that person has attained the fifteenth birthday. In our view, therefore, the statutory aggravating factor would apply here since the victim had reached his fourteenth birthday, but had not reached his fifteenth birthday. Farrow does not compel a different result. There, the statute applied to defendants who were  over the age of sixteen years (emphasis supplied). This phraseology is quite different from the current statute, which relates to a victim who is fourteen years old or younger  (emphasis supplied). Unlike the statute at issue here, the statute in Farrow was essentially a threshold statute, which applied once the defendant had crossed the threshold of his or her sixteenth birthday. The court in Farrow, therefore, read the statute as applying to a person's age throughout the defendant's remaining life after crossing that threshold. The statute we are now construing, 11 Del.C. § 4209(e)(1)s., would not be applicable after the victim had reached his or her fifteenth birthday. As we construe the statute and apply it to the undisputed facts here, the victim was fourteen years of age, between his fourteenth birthday and his fifteenth birthday. Farrow does not speak to that issue. It speaks to an entirely different statutory framework, and therefore is distinguishable.