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Cal. PEN § 801.7

This is the official text of Cal. PEN § 801.7, part of California’s Penal Code — defines crimes and sets criminal procedure in California.

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Official statutory text

(a) Notwithstanding Section 801 or any other law, prosecution for a felony offense described in Section 502 shall be commenced within three years after discovery of the commission of the offense, or within three years after the offense could have reasonably been discovered, provided, however, that in any case a complaint shall not be filed more than six years after the commission of the offense.

(b) This section applies to crimes that are committed on or after January 1, 2022, and to crimes for which the statute of limitations that was in effect prior to January 1, 2022, has not elapsed as of January 1, 2022.

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.