Adults, eighteen years of age or older, are criminally liable. Minors, between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, are criminally liable if they are judged capable of understanding the act and its significance and of controlling their actions. Juveniles under fourteen years of age and mentally deficient persons unable to understand the nature or significance of a criminal act are not criminally liable. Courts may hand down punishments of eleven different varieties. In addition to fines, confiscation of property, and confinement, they may sentence a guilty person to corrective labor or compulsory residence without confinement. They may deprive an individual of the right to occupy certain governmental or public positions, of the right to practice certain professions or activities, of the right to residence in a specified place, or of the right to earn decorations and awards. If he is on duty with the military, a court may remove his rank. It may also administer a public reprimand, alone or in combination with another type of punishment. The sentence, however, should be within the upper and lower limits in the amounts of fines or the time period for which the other sentences may apply. Such limits are set down in the code. The death penalty is never a mandatory sentence in peacetime. It is optional for a considerable number of crimes, but it is handed down only if the circumstances of a particular crime that is before the court are exceptionally serious. When the maximum sentence is deprivation of freedom and does not include a possible death sentence, the duration of the sentence will be no longer than fifteen years. If the maximum sentence can be death, twenty years deprivation of freedom may be substituted for execution. The stipulated sentences for crimes against the state tend to be more severe than sentences for crimes against individuals. Theft of public property is punishable by confinement of up to eight years, of private property by no more than three years. Robbery involving public property may result in a sentence of from three to ten years; if it involves private property, the range is from three to eight years. Although the individual's rights appear to have more than ample safeguards, the situation may be less utopian than the wording of the criminal code would suggest. For example, a 1973 amendment to the laws pertaining to personal property states that "when a citizen is found to possess more property than he could reasonably have acquired from his regular income, he is considered to have acquired it illegally unless he can prove to the contrary." Courts