Age questions...from a soon to be LEO to another...

[RHZig]

I figured there would be someone in here that knows the Texas Family Code and could answer a question.

In the police academy we covered it and I should have asked but I didn't.

However, I have a question regarding age.

In some cases a 17 year old will be an adult in Texas evidently. I am thinking it depends on what law you're breaking at 17 whether or not you'll be treated as a child or adult. I.E. truancy vs. murder.

Here is an excerpt from the Family Code 51.01:

(2) "Child" means a person who is:
(A) ten years of age or older and under 17 years
of age; or
(B) seventeen years of age or older and under 18
years of age who is alleged or found to have engaged in delinquent
conduct or conduct indicating a need for supervision as a result of
acts committed before becoming 17 years of age.

I am just confused as to what is considered an adult. For testing purposes we must know that 10-17 is a child.

Can someone please shed some light as to what constitutes a child and what circumstances would you be considered an adult? Thanks in advance.

[srothstein]

Sure, this is easy. An adult is anyone who is on their 21st birthday or older. That is from the Alcoholic Beverage Code.

On a serious side, the problem is that the definition of who is an adult differs based not only on the code, but on the actual section of the code. Given that, here is the general rule:

An adult is someone who is 17 or older. A child is anyone younger than 17. The easy way to remember this is that at 17 they go to jail and any earlier go to juvenile detention centers.

There are all sorts of exceptions, of course. The one you mention is the obvious one. For criminal justice purposes, a person is still a juvenile if they are under the age of 18 but committed the offense and were sentenced by a juvenile court while they were under 17.

For the Penal Code, injury to a child is under age 14, consent to sex is 17 but can consent if 15 and the other person is within three years. Sexual Performance by a child is under 18 and under 10 cannot be a criminal (theoretically no capability to have a culpable mental state).

For the family code, under 18 can not consent to marriage without parental permission.

And all of these are just a fraction of the possibilities. I wish we could just define adult as one age for everything and juvenile as anything less than that. But this is also why I go with the above general rule (jail or juvenile) and keep a copy of the penal code in my patrol car with me.

[RHZig]

Thanks, that cleared it up somewhat.

Maybe it will become second nature to me soon. Family Code is rather in depth. Esp. when it comes to finger printing juveniles and what happens when you class c citation them and they don't pay it.