Whether punishing a common-law infant without requisite knowledge and mens rea violates the Eighth Amendment and due process rights when the defendant was charged with a statutory offense

Two teenagers meet at a party, youth being what it is, they act on chemicals triggered in their brains —what we call attraction. These chemicals are designed to drive action. The force at work here is the biological drive to propagate the species. Since the first singlecelled organism formed, that force to create two, has governed everything we do. A 19-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl engaged in consensual intercourse. Except she knew her biological drive would remain unsatisfied, so the girl lied — she was actually 13. Below are the questions, verbatim, as posed to the California Supreme Court. The Questions Presented are: 1. Whether punishing a common-law infant in violation of a substantive rule of criminal procedure when devoid of the requisite knowledge and guilty mens rea required by the statute renders the conviction void in violation of the Eighth Amendment as held in Montgomery v. Louisiana, 577 U.S. 190, 206 (2016). 2. Whether the denial of the defense of mistake of fact in violation of procedural due process guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment as held in Montana v. Egelhoff 518 U.S. 37, 56 (1996) and Kohler v. Kansas, 140 S. Ct. 1021, 1027 (2020) afforded to all as codified in Penal Code §§ 26, 1019, 1020 renders a judgment void because of the jurisdictional defect resulting from the denial of the Sixth Amendment rights of trial by jury, confrontation, obtaining favorable witnesses, and assistance of counsel. l