Many jurisdictions have a “statute of limitations” for certain crimes, meaning that if a certain amount of time has passed since the incident and you haven’t been arrested or charged, you can no longer be charged. This is apparently at least partially based around the common sense principles that after a certain amount of time passes, witnesses and evidence becomes less reliable (can you remember whether you saw or did not see your father near the old warehouse on January 5th, 1975 when you were 15 and was he carrying his gun?), or that if a person has gone that long without going to jail for something else, they have rehabilitated themself and are not currently a danger to society. Some jurisdictions don’t have limitations for some (or all?) offenses, and few(if any) have a limitation for murder.
What is the longest period that has elapsed in real life between an alleged crime and an arrest? I had a weird image in my mind of a SWAT team raiding a nursing home today (December 2011) and hauling off a nonagenarian on 3 counts of Bootlegging allegedly committed in 1927.
I thought that some Nazi war criminals had been arrested fairly recently, so that’s probably a 50-year span at least.
For indictments, you might want to look for cases in the Middle Ages where people were tried and convicted for heresy many years after they died. A famous example is John Wycliffe, whose bones were dug up and burned by order of the Pope some 44 years after he died, and probably at least 50 years after some of his alleged offenses.
John Demjanjuk - alleged prison camp guard. Emigrated to USA in 1952, returned after Israeli acquital in the 90’s, ordered deported in 2005 for “lying on his immigration application”, finally deported in 2008. Wikipedia says the second round of charges was filed in 2001 (for crimes 1945 and earlier) so that’s 56 years; or for his deportation order, assuming it also was a charge in 2001, that’s 49 years.
All this because someone thought he was “Ivan the Terrible”. When it was pretty obvious that this was wrong, they went after him anyway, and eventually he was convicted by the Germans(!) because even though he was shanghaied into it from the Ukrain, he was a guard and therefore as guilty as everyone in the concentration camp heirarchy…
I also recall some news story about some guy who worked for a traveling circus or show; he killed a girl and disappeared back in the 1950s in Maryland IIRC. After all the computerized records were connected in the 90’s, someone opened the cold case and found his name and birth date on a drivers license in some midwest state. They still had the DNA evidence.
There was a murder (of a Los Angeles Co. police officer in the 1950’s). A homeowner found the gun…and the cold case squad traced it to a gun shop in Alabama or Mississippi.
They found the perp (who was in his late 60’s)-he wound up convicted and sentenced to jail for life.