Can someone explain to me the legal reasoning for having statutes of limitations on crimes?
I can understand that evidence often gets harder to obtain as time goes on, but couldn’t this be sorted out at trial? After all, a large portion of any trial is evaluating the quality of the evidence that’s presented (and what will be presented in the first place.)
One could even imagine cases where the quality of evidence would improve over time (witnesses getting over their fears, new investigative techniques, etc.)
I particularly notice that the limits are not set particularly long. For the examples I looked at, it’s not like the crime is ancient history when the statue of limitations kicks in.
And in practice, it’s rather common to see cases that would be prosecutable except for the statute of limitations. It’s not like it only happens in a few corner cases.
So where do these come from? Do all countries do the same thing?
In New Zealand the Limitations Act only applies to civil actions. There is no time limit on criminal matters. There have been quite a number of prosecutions for sexual abuse cases that go back twenty or thiry years or more. AFAIK this is the case for most Commonwealth countries.
Here’s a link to the Limitation Act 1950 (I htink it might just take you to the homepage, the Act in quesiton is the Limitation Act 1950.
It’s like a contest… to win, you have to outlast the police until the statute of limitations runs out. If you do, you get the choice of either having the case eliminated, or a new washer-dryer set.
Few people take the washer-dryer set, come to think of it…
There are some crimes for which there is no statute of limitations; murder being the prime example. For lesser crimes the feeling is that with the passage of time the evidence becomes too cold, both for the defendant and the state, to have a fair trial. Imagine you are accused of breaking into a house ten years ago. How do you show an alabi? Who remembers where they were or what they were doing that long ago? It is a balance. With murder the severity of the crime and the perceived danger of the criminal to society tips the balance in favor of not having a statute of limitations.
It is to prevent a never-aging government from having a massive advantage over a mortal defendant. With time, memory fades and important witnesses move forever to a Higher Court of Justice.
The SoL was given to us from the Common Law as part of the idea of a speedy trial in the precinct in which the offense occurred. Time, like distance changes the nature of a place and “Justice delayed is justice denied.”
The points are well taken but let’s twist this. Isn’t it for a jury to decide? If we can clog the courts with suits for just about anything (Say: MacDonald’s made me fat). Why not let the person be prosecuted and the jury decide.
If I rob a house and 10 years go by does the passage of time make me less guilty. As a victim I would want that person punished.
The essential point is that the QUALITY of the evidence degrades over time. Witnesses’ memories degrade, but their own subjective impression of the quality of those meories fade more slowly.
In the USA, we have a history of beleiving that it’s better to let the guilty go free than to wrongly punish the innocent. Given theu huge assymettry in power between an individual and the government, that attitude is probably one of the main things standing between the USA as it is today and a police state.
Those two threads come together in the SoL: The quality of evidence and hence the quality of justice depends on time. If a trial prompty after the fact with fresh witnesses and fresh physical evidence has an X percent chance of reaching the truly correct decision (known only to Og), then one delayed by 10 years may only have a X/4 percent chance of arriving at that correct answer. At some point it simply turns into a lottery.
You said “As a victim I would want that person punished.” But how much are you willing to risk punishing someone, anyone, who’s not in fact the guilty party.
TV these days is saturated with shows purporting that modern crime-fighting technology and the police / prosecutorial bureaucracy are both highly effective and very accurate. Anyone who actually works in those fields will tell you that the truth is rather more dismal.
The argument that since the quality of evidence degrades over time we should only allow the most heinous crimes to be prosecuted doesn’t make much sense. So now we convict people of much more serious charges based on flimsy evidence? If anyone deserves a fair trial, it’s someone who faces the most serious consequences of being convicted. I’m not arguing for or against the SoL, just pointing out the inconsistency in the argument.
If I accuse you of being the person that robbed me yesterday at gunpoint, and fervently swear that I never forget a face, it will be relatively easy for you to establish an alibi - you remember where you where yesterday, and so do your friends, and so will the clerk that waited on you at the video store at the exact time the robbery was taking place. You will easily be able to show a jury that I am mistaken in my identification.
If I accuse you of being the person that robbed me at gunpoint on December 13, 1982, what kind of alibi will you be able to come up with?
Another two arguments in favour of statutes of limitations:
the impact of a crime diminishes over time. When I had my pocket picked in 1989 I would very much have liked to have the person punished for the loss and the huge inconvenience (some important documents were taken). Now the difference that this act has made to what my life is today is infinitesimal, and I don’t see the point of punishing anybody if his guilt were established today. Same goes for e.g. robbery or assault - I’d have got over it by now. It still does make a difference to me and my family that I wasn’t murdered in 1989, but at some point in the future it’s not going to matter either.
if a perpetrator has not been caught for a long time chances are that he has become reformed and not reoffended (because if he had been caught for crime B, the police would likely looked at the similar crime A again). Punishing the offender in such a case would pluck a law-abiding citizen from the place he had made himself in society, making him a criminal again, and more likely to reoffend. Society would be ill served by that.