Court Opinion

ID: 9765683
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-29 04:13:46.248825+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T07:30:13.478044
License: Public Domain

HUNSTEIN, Chief Justice,
concurring specially.
I write specially because I disagree with the majority’s holding in Division 1 that accuseds who were under the age of 13 when their alleged crimes were committed must raise their age as an “affirmative defense” in order to obtain the protection accorded such children by OCGA § 16-3-1. Pursuant to that statute, “[a] person shall not be considered or found guilty of a crime unless he has attained the age of 13 years at the time of the act, omission, or negligence constituting the crime.” This statute preserved the language in former Ga. Code Ann. § 26-302 and “is intended to have the same effect. That is, one under the prescribed age is not to be prosecuted as a criminal, although he may be dealt with as the law provides for juveniles who violate the law.” Committee Notes to § 26-701 of the 1968 Criminal Code. I would recognize that the Legislature with the enactment of this statutory language has determined that no child under the age of 13 who commits a criminal offense may be accused of, i.e., “considered,” or found guilty of committing that crime. Once the date of birth is established so as to place a child within the ambit of OCGA § 16-3-1, allowing that child to “waive” that legal bar would utterly thwart the Legislature’s purpose of protecting such a child from ever being considered or found guilty of a crime.
OCGA § 16-3-1 by its plain language establishes that children who commit criminal offenses at the time they are under the age of 13 are categorically ineligible to be prosecuted for or convicted of those offenses. The statute thus operates in the same manner as the United States Supreme Court’s holding in Roper v. Simmons, 543 U. S. 551 (125 SC 1183, 161 LE2d 1) (2005), which categorically prohibits the execution of an accused who was under the age of 18 when he committed a capital offense. I would hold that a child under the age of 13 who commits a criminal offense is no more able to “waive” the legal bar to prosecution set forth in OCGA § 16-3-1 than a defendant who commits a capital offense when under the age of 18 can “waive” the constitutional proscription against the execution of a death sentence. However, under the majority’s rationale concluding that the categorical prohibition in OCGA § 16-3-1 is nothing more than an “affirmative defense,” it follows that a waiver by a child who does not raise the effect of his or her age on a criminal prosecution under OCGA § 16-3-1 or, similarly, its effect on the imposition of a death sentence under Roper, would authorize the State to prosecute and convict a child of *704crimes committed while under 13 years of age and to execute a child found guilty of a capital felony committed when under 18 years of age. This result is unwarranted. Accordingly, I cannot agree with the majority’s holding because it deprives every child in this State of the protection from prosecution and conviction that the Legislature in its wisdom accorded such children in OCGA § 16-3-11 should that child fail or choose not to raise his age as a defense, even in situations where, like here, the State knows that the child’s age may place him ’within the law’s protection.
In this case, appellant’s indictment charged him with committing child molestation and aggravated child molestation occurring on and between May 1, 2007 and March 20, 2008. However, because the State did not specifically allege that those dates were material, appellant was subject to being prosecuted and found guilty of the charged crimes within the applicable seven-year statute of limitation. The record in this case establishes that appellant was born on August 4,1992,2 such that the alleged offenses technically could have occurred at a time when appellant was legally barred from being considered or found guilty of the charged crimes, i.e., before appellant attained the age of 13 on August 4, 2005.
I concur in the majority’s holding not because it is correct regarding the legal application of OCGA § 16-3-1 to this case but because my review of the evidence adduced at trial establishes that there is no possibility the jury convicted appellant of the charged offenses based upon any acts committed when appellant was under the age of 13. The victim’s mother testified at trial that the victim first related information to her about the molestation on March 9, 2008. Although the State curiously failed to introduce any evidence regarding the victim’s precise age,3 the victim said she was four years old during a recorded forensic interview that was conducted on March 14, 2008. Thus, for the molestation to have occurred before appellant reached the age of criminal responsibility in August 2005, it would have had to occur when the victim was, at best, approxi-
*705Decided February 7, 2011
Reconsideration denied March 7, 2011.
Rafe Banks III, Daisy D. Weeks, for appellant.
Lee Darragh, District Attorney, Theodore G. Cassert, Assistant District Attorney, for appellee.
mately two years old.4 No reasonable juror could have found that this particular victim, even if she were capable at two years of age of understanding the acts of molestation that appellant was charged with perpetrating on her, somehow remembered those acts and yet waited over 30 months before making the statements that alerted her mother5 and then detailing the molestation in the present tense manner shown by the recorded forensic interview viewed by the jury.
Accordingly, I concur for evidentiary reasons only in the majority’s holding. I also take the opportunity to caution prosecutors that where, as here, the potential exists that an accused was under the age of 13 within the statute of limitation applicable to the commission of a charged criminal offense, the indictment should be drafted carefully to avoid any possibility of the jury considering or finding the accused guilty before he or she has attained the age of 13 years at the time of the act, omission, or negligence constituting the crime. OCGA § 16-3-1.
I am authorized to state that Justice Melton joins in this special concurrence.

 By logical extension, the majority’s rationale also presents the potential of authorizing the State in violation of Roper, supra, to use the child’s “waiver” as the reason to execute a child under the age of 18 at the time he committed a capital offense.

 A review of the record in this case — from the affidavit submitted to the magistrate court to obtain the arrest warrant to the superior court’s production orders to the youth detention center to release appellant for trial — is replete with notations identifying appellant by his birth date. I thus disagree with the majority that any fact question exists in this case regarding when appellant was horn. There is no issue whether the State put the incorrect date of birth on appellant’s arrest warrant or whether the inmate production orders to the youth detention center identified a different “Mitchell Adams” with the “DOB: 08/04/1992.”

 The prosecutor in opening stated that the victim was four years old “[w]hen this happened” but was “currently five” at the time of the January 2009 trial.

 This assumes that the victim was just shy of her fifth birthday at the time of the forensic interview.

 The victim complained on March 9, 2008 about experiencing pain when the mother sought to bathe her.