Kuwait Court of Cassation principle number 18

Summary: - The maximum penalties for a juvenile who has passed 15 but has not completed 18 years of age. The judge may not exceed them. Their minimum was left unrestricted. Its import: the legislature made young age one of the statutory excuses. Mitigation is mandatory within the limits of the provision. It differs from the mitigating circumstances provided for in the Penal Code. Mitigating circumstances. Their assessment is a matter of fact. Rule: It is established that the legislature, in Article 14 of Law No. 3 of 1983 concerning Juveniles, set maximum penalties that may be imposed upon a juvenile who has passed 15 but has not completed 18 years of age, which the judge may not exceed. It left their minimum unrestricted, prescribing no minimum term. Thus, the legislature made young age one of the statutory excuses exhaustively specified in the Law, for which mitigation is mandatory within the limits set out by the provision prescribing it. These differ from the mitigating circumstances referred to in Article 83 of the Penal Code, the existence or absence of which the judge is permitted to assess when imposing the penalty according to what becomes apparent to him of the circumstances of the offence and its perpetrator, provided that, when applying grounds for leniency, he observes the minimum limits in the said Article. To hold otherwise would defeat the court sought by the legislature in regulating the juvenile offender’s criminal responsibility according to his year at the time of committing the offence, and the corrective measures and mitigated penalties specifically provided for him, consistent with his discernment giving rise to criminal responsibility. That being so, and whereas it is apparent from the papers that the accused had passed 15 but had not completed 18 years of age, and the penalty prescribed for the first offence provided for in Article 180 of the Penal Code—namely kidnapping by deception with intent to commit indecent assault—which was established against him by the incriminating evidence previously set out, is death in the case of an adult accused, whereas for a juvenile accused, pursuant to the first paragraph of Article 14 of the Juveniles Law, it is imprisonment for a term not exceeding 10 years, the Court imposes the penalty to the extent to be stated in the operative part.