I was wondering what happens to prisoners serving jail time if the law they broke is repealed? This came up today when a group of us were talking about the end of Prohibition. What happened to the people jailed for having a stash of Canadian Club when suddenly that was no longer a crime?
It would depend on the terms of the law that repealed the previous law. If the legislature is simply updating its laws and re-defining offences, not much. But in the Prohibition case, the legislature could decide to create a general amnesty for people serving time.
For an example of the former, in the early 80s, Canada substantially reformed the law relating to sexual events. In particular, Parliament abolished the offence of “rape”, in part because it was considered too narrow in some respects (i.e. - the Crown had to prove that penetration had occurred; it was only a man attacking a women, no other permutations). As well, there were no gradations to the offence. Parliament replaced it with three different offences: sexual assault, sexual assault with a weapon, and aggravated sexual assault.
Even though “rape” was abolished, that didn’t mean that all convicted rapists were immediately set free. The public policy concerning rape/sexual assault hadn’t changed, just the way it was defined in law.
Prohibition may have been different. If a legislature decided to repeal Prohibition, they may also have decided to give an amnesty to anyone convicted of simple possssion of liquor who was serving time.
But would that have been very many people? I would have thought simple possession would have just been a fine. I also would have thought that most of those who were in jail in relation to the liquor trade would have been there for other, more serious offences, such as assault, bribing police officers, breach of customs laws, and all the other violent activities that go with a criminal enterprise. For example, Al Capone was serving time for income tax evasion in relation to the revenues from his criminal enterprise. He didn’t get sprung, since tax evasion was still a cime - he died in jail.
I also saw just recently a case where a high school boy who was 17 had sex with a consenting 15 year old girl. He then got charged with rape and is labeled a sex offender for life and is in jail for 10 years.
Since then (a couple years ago) the state he was in changed the law since it seemed a harsh penalty for a couple high-school kids messing around.
However, since the old law was in effect when he did the crime he is still stuck in jail. He has to wait until he can apppeal.
Nitpick : No he didn’t
In general, if the law in question is repealed during the pendency of any direct appeals of the case, then the conviction may be set aside. Once there is a final, unreviewable judgement of conviction, then the repeal of the law does not require that previous convictions be voided.
What if the law is ruled unconstitutional?
Different story. Then the court is saying, in essence, “This law was NEVER valid.” You can file a habeas and get released.
Weird… so if a prisoner somehow overlooks doing that, he could continue to sit in jail even though he had, in effect, a get-out-of-jail free card. Can’t happen very often, though, can it?
It’s happened before.
The general case - a prisoner remaining imprisoned although legally entitled to be freed, has happened more than you’d care to imagine.
Oops. My mistake - thanks for the correction.
However, he wasn’t released from jail until 1939, according to that article, which was about six years after the repeal of Prohibition by the 21st Amendment, which was the point I was (clumsily) trying to make.
But Al Capone wasn’t convicted for violating prohibition, he was convicted for income tax evasion, which is against the law even to this very day.
True - never said he was.
The reason I mentioned Capone originally is that he is the epitome of the gangster who was engaged in the liquor traffic, contrary to the Prohibition laws, which is what the OP gave as an example. Howver, as I noted in post # 2, I would expect that many of the convicts who were in jail when Prohibition was repealed may not have been there for breach of the Prohibition laws themselves, but for a lot of ancillary offences when you’re engaging in an illegal enterprise - such as Capone. The repeal of Prohibition would not have affected such prisoners, even though the basic reason they were in jail was for trying to circumvent Prohibition. Perhaps I was read too much into the OP’s question.
In the early 70s the SCOTUS declared the death penalty (as then applied) was unconstitutional. Thus all the people on death row at the time had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
After the states re-wrote their laws to fit what the court says would be constitutional the death penalty was allowed again.
Wait, what? Oh shit! I’ll be right back.
When the political tides shifted after the 1800 election of Thomas Jefferson. and Congress repealed the Alien and Sedition Act, President Jefferson pardoned everyone who’d earlier been convicted of violating it (since it had been applied in a highly partisan fashion against people of his party).
Congress didn’t repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts. They both sunsetted.
The Sedition Act had a sunset clause - it was to run from July 14, 1798 to March 3, 1801 (wasn’t that the date that the President took office back then?). I don’t see a sunset clause in the Alien Act , but it only applied when there was a declared state of war, so would cease to apply when war with a particular country ended.
Interestingly, section 4 of the Sedition Act addresses the very point raised by the OP: