Short answer. Yes. Article 13 lists being over seventy years old, at the time of the offense, as a mitigating circumstance, which can lower the penalty a court imposes. This is separate from the article's under-eighteen threshold, which Republic Act No. 9344, as amended by Republic Act No. 10630, has since superseded with its own juvenile justice framework.
What the law says
That the offender is under eighteen years of age or over seventy years.
Revised Penal Code, Article 13 — Mitigating Circumstances. Read the full provision →
Age as one of ten mitigating circumstances
Article 13 lists ten mitigating circumstances a court may take into account, and the second is age-based: that the offender is under eighteen years of age or over seventy years. Being over seventy at the time the offense was committed is, by the article's own text, one of the ten circumstances the article recognizes as mitigating, alongside things like acting without intent to commit so grave a wrong, sufficient provocation, or voluntary surrender.
How a mitigating circumstance affects the penalty
A mitigating circumstance does not erase criminal liability or create a defense to the charge itself; what it does is factor into how the penalty is set once liability has been established. Article 13 groups this age threshold together with the other nine circumstances the article lists as the kind of fact a court weighs in fixing the penalty, distinguishing it from circumstances elsewhere in the Code that instead justify the act or exempt the offender from liability altogether.
Why 'over seventy' is different from the article's other age threshold
It matters here that Article 13's age provision names two separate thresholds in the same sentence: under eighteen, and over seventy. Only the first of these has been overtaken by later law — Republic Act No. 9344, as amended by Republic Act No. 10630, replaced the old under-eighteen mitigating treatment with a separate framework that can exempt a child from criminal liability entirely, rather than merely mitigate the penalty, and routes a qualifying child into intervention or diversion instead of prosecution. That later legislation addresses minority specifically; it does not touch the over-seventy threshold, which remains part of Article 13's mitigating circumstances as written.
What this circumstance does not do
Because it is a mitigating circumstance rather than an exempting one, being over seventy does not by itself remove criminal responsibility or stop a prosecution from proceeding. It also does not automatically fix how much lower the penalty will be — that depends on how the court weighs this circumstance together with any others present in the case, including whatever aggravating circumstances the prosecution may also prove.