After many years, new DNA techniques are allowing prosecutors to charge someone in a rape case. I wonder why it is possible to prosecute sometimes -- and not other times -- for old crimes. Is the idea that the evidence after a certain number of years is just too old and too cold -- that there are too many ways the state and defence might be ignorant, in trying a case 20 years old? Or is the idea that the person who did the crime may have changed so much in 20 years that it would be unfair to hold him or her to account? Or is the rationale simpler: it would clog up the courts too much to have old cases competing with new cases for scarce resources? Or, finally, is the consideration just that those whose lives are disrupted by a criminal investigation have some right to state assurance that, after a certain number of years, they can count on criminal matters being closed and can go on with their lives?
This matters, partly, because old crimes built some of the institutions and entitlements we take for granted: our claim to land, private and corporate claims to wealth, individual claims to moral authority. The hope of the Corleone family in the Godfather series is that, in 3 or 4 generations, they will be just like the Rockefellers. They will have left their past behind. Every smart thug has the same hope. It is part of the complex mission of a state, as the holder of public responsibility, to permit the past to be left behind and to prevent the past being left behind. It will matter how each state takes account of that responsibility.
Posted by shea0017 at August 23, 2004 1:12 PM