"City Using DNA To Skirt Statute Of Limitations For Rapes"

It's one thing to lengthen the statute of limitations quite another to indict a DNA without a person attached to it.

I would also question the procedures of labs given all the cases where shoddy forensic work was involved.

This is political grandstanding.

No indictment and the Stat of Lim just passes - with the indictment they have a time period still - just ends a little bit later - and out of state time does not count!

Just something else I've always been curious about.

Why on earth would there be a "statute of limitations" on prosecuting people suspected of committing serious crimes?

The state does not have perfect and complete knowledge of everything that goes on in the world. Victims sometimes have no knowledge at all of who committed crimes against them.

The only person who knows who committed a crime is not infrequently the person who committed it.

What I simply cannot understand is why that person's successful concealment of his/her crime/identity should immunize him/her against prosection for it.

Up here, summary conviction offences (= misdemeanours) do have a limitation. Indictable offences (=felonies) most definitely do not. Once a suspect is identified and the necessary evidence assembled, a charge must be laid in reasonable time, and s/he has a right to a trial within a reasonable time (something our Supreme Court has taken rather a hard line on). But the state simply does not lose its right to prosecute and punish someone who committed a serious offence because it didn't do so at a time when it had no way of discovering who that person was or what s/he had done.

I'm at a loss to know what interest is being served by imposing such a limitation.

Just the queries of a bemused foreigner.

.

evidence decays, figuratively and literally.

"witnesses forget. alibi's become difficult.
evidence decays, figuratively and literally."

... are not insurmountable barriers to a fair trial, if that was what your point was. Things like the rules of evidence, and the requirement for proof beyond a reasonable doubt, address most of those factors quite adequately already. (Yeah, alibi might be difficult to establish. Few trials turn on alibi evidence.)

In fact, most of them would seem to operate IN FAVOUR OF an accused person at trial, not against him/her. I don't get why the state should be precluded from holding such a trial because ITS OWN evidence may be weaker than it would have been at some point in the past.

Still wondering ...

it all depends on the jury. the "innocent until proven guilty" standard only matter so long as the jury gets it. there's no guarantee they do, or will.

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