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Cal. PEN § 270.5

This is the official text of Cal. PEN § 270.5, part of California’s Penal Code — defines crimes and sets criminal procedure in California.

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Official statutory text

(a) Every parent who refuses, without lawful excuse, to accept his or her minor child into the parent’s home, or, failing to do so, to provide alternative shelter, upon being requested to do so by a child protective agency and after being informed of the duty imposed by this statute to do so, is guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be punished by a fine of not more than five hundred dollars ($500).

(b) For purposes of this section, “child protective agency” means a police or sheriff’s department, a county probation department, or a county welfare department.

(c) For purposes of this section, “lawful excuse” shall include, but not be limited to, a reasonable fear that the minor child’s presence in the home will endanger the safety of the parent or other persons residing in the home.

Status: in_force · Read it on the official government site

About this page: Statute text is reproduced from official government publishers via the Open US Law dataset (Vaquill AI, snapshot v2026.08, CC BY 4.0). Primary legislative text like this is public domain under the government-edicts doctrine (Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, 2020). We link every section back to its official source so you can verify it independently.