It’s not clear to me why we should have a hard and fast statute of limitations for that reason instead of simply factoring it in when deciding whether the prosecution has proven its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
In adversarial systems, the prosecution's objective isn't to reach a truth, but instead to fight to convict you. This incentivises dirty tricks, misrepresentation of facts, and ultimately the full force of state resources looking at putting you behind bars. And during this whole process you are often locked up anyways for this process, independent of actual guilt.
In that model and imbalance of resources, having statue of limitations in place alleviates the need for defendents to, for example, keep records of their actions and reasoning for 30+ years. How would you navigate being charged for tax evasion from 35 years ago, for example?
EDIT: to be clear, I don't think this is necessarily a precise defense of statuetes of limitations specifically, just a "well they're not a bad idea" sort of defense
Amen, brother. You hit the nail on the head with this one. Going to get all the charges against me dismissed by the prosecutor tomorrow, but took ten years of being in jail, waiting for trial, before they came to that decision. The system is broken :(
> In that model and imbalance
> of resources, having statue
> of limitations[...]
Would a statue of limitations be symbolic like the statue of liberty, or an autonomous mecha or golem serving as an independent check on state power, whose slumber you'd disturb at your peril?
Inquisitorial systems (more present in civil law systems big also present in some US courts) have the judge act as a fact finder. In that model the judge is basically an active participant in figuring out what happens, instead of just being a referee in between two parties. So the judge (a professional whose job it is to do this) is more of an active participant and a determiner of guilt rather than 12 randos off the street (modulo a bunch of stuff). This leads to things like guilty plea bargains not being as much of a thing if the judge doesn’t believe the confession.
Source: I read the Wikipedia article on inquisitorial systems and watch tv. So I don’t know what I’m talking about but it sounds nice (also aligns with what I’ve heard about French court procedure) I think this covers Japan too (anyone who plays phoenix wright might wonder: why is the judge just declaring a result?)
The same could be said for any bit of courtroom procedure. Why forbid a prosecutor from making an illegal inference, or entering illegal evidence, when you can just instruct the jury after-the-fact to disregard it?
The jury doesn't just live in a vaccum. There are rules for what kind of evidence is admissible to them, and we don't just leave it to the jury to yolo it.
Sometimes, those rules don't make 100% sense. That's the case with any set of rules (Especially ones surrounding legal procedure!). We set rules, because we think that they are a good idea most of the time.
And most of the time, for most crimes, the tradeoff between trying a decades-old case, and of preventing the harassment of an innocent person over a decades-old-case leans towards the latter.
Remembering that the most severe crimes usually have no statute of limitations, one strong case for having them is so people can move on from their past without fear a minor, unprosecuted crime will come back to haunt them.
