Recently I saw a story on Chicago police midnight crew. Being from outside the US - it was my first time of reading about Jon Burge and I checked out further details of this story.

Then an old beast reared its head again, "the Statute Of Limitations", because Jon Burge got away with some brutal torturing due to the Statute of Limitation expiring. This time I've heard of the Statute of Limitation a million times before, except that now I went further to google the justifications for the Statute of Limitations. And surprise surprise its a whole load of BS, I mean I've watched a lots of crime documentaries and have seen evidence older than 10 years still being forensically testable, valid and tenable... and eye witness evidence can still be verified...

If not, the judge should state clearly during a trial that this case cannot continue because the evidence presented can no longer be used because its validity is questionable. Hence it should be determined case by case rather than creating a blanket ban on all or certain non-homicidal cases beyond certain number of years

well maybe its BS relative to my own view and standard...

Hence throwing it here, maybe, just maybe someone might spin it in a way that makes it look like it makes some sense. Rather than me jumping to bizarre conclusions about the countries where SoL still holds out...

It is a tricky thing. There needs to be a balance between the rights of the individual and the rights of society.

Usually the statue of limitations is designed to protect the guilty from the long-forgotten past. You might not have paid your taxes five years ago but nobody caught you; as long as you've been paying ever since you've changed your ways. You might have stolen something many years before but you've reformed your life and have spent the last decade as an upstanding citizen.

In the case of the news story the people who was pressured into giving the confessions 25 years ago has been set free. They did it in the past to a hundred or so people, but they did it in the 1970s and 1980s. Presumably at some point in the past several decades those same officers saw the error of their ways and corrected it.

We want people to face consequences for their actions and make restitution if the can. But there comes a point where as a society we generally need to say "it was too long ago, the person has changed and those involved have generally moved on." That might be one year, or three years, or five years, or whatever. At some point everybody has moved on from the fact that a child stole pack of gum, or that someone broke a window, whatever the crime happens to be.

For some crimes the statue is much longer. Ten years, fifteen years. Serious crimes like exploitation of a minor or forceable rape generally (but not always) fall here. The one in the news story could have a long statute of limitations but because everyone says they stopped doing it two decades ago they are unlikely to face criminal charges. (It is possible there will be civil lawsuits, but that's a different thing entirely.)

Very few crimes are so bad we don't care how long ago it was. Some are so bad that we don't care if the perpetrator is 95 years old and the crime was committed 80 years ago, society and our laws say they still need to face consequences. Murder is generally the universal crime here, child rape sometimes has no time limit for prosecution. In a few locations rape charges and other serious crimes have no time limitations.

The other side for short timelines also happens. Minor infractions like speeding or jaywalking tend to have very short expiration dates, like 30 days or similar. If the citations don't come quickly the person got away with it, and admitting they were speeding or jaywalking several months later has minimal consequences.

There are also deadlines for appeals and filing time limits. Those gets tricky because there have been actual cases where people were being punished and new stuff showing their innocence was discovered after the fact. Everybody including the people who originally sought prosecution realize there was a mistake and the person is being wrongly punished, but due to the cutoff dates judges hesitate or refuse to accept the new content. Those get sorted out eventually but they are annoying problems that crop up.

Agreed, "moving on" from historical "not so serious/mildly serious crimes" makes a lot of sense.

If someone stole my car that cost me say £5000.00, it will definitely hurt me badly, but after say 7 years or so, I would have moved on and of course hoping the perpetrator shows contrite.

If on the other hand I was tortured in to confessing for crimes I did not commit, and spent 25 years behind the bars, I could never move on from that, I would always be thinking of things I could have done in that time - get married, have grown up kids, build up a great career, have a good circle of friends (as opposed to hardened criminals friends I would met in jail). I can't move on from that. If the victims can't move on why should the law allow the perpetrators to move on? The case of the news story falls here. But as you said its a delicate tricky balance.

I feel a lot more understanding with the reasons for Statute of Limitations now, though not completely for this ^^^

The problem is, we have to balance:

- societal justice (the desire that, overall, the system feels fair and people trying to 'cheat' don't ultimately profit (this is a goal, not a reality))

- public safety (removing harmful people from society to prevent them from causing more harm) [editted in]

- dissuasion (having steep enough punishments for future potential perpetrators to say the risk isn't worth it)

- reformation (the desire for the perpetrator to genuinely change his ways)

- vengeance (the desire for the victims (including family) to feel like the perpetrator has experienced some of the victims' pain. Call it a desire for enforced empathy)

- restitution (trying to compensate the victims for the wrongs done them)

[blue for victims' benefit, brown for perpetrator's benefit, cyan for society's benefit]

Add to that, as human beings - out of sometimes righteous anger, mostly unrighteous anger, pride, and/or self-righteousness - we tend to have a desire to crush and destroy and punish others for their crimes to make us feel better about who we are.

Sure, I'm not perfect, and I've said some things in the heat of the moment I've regretted, but that movie star made a racist remark - drag them into the streets and kneecap them!

But I do like the TV show they starred in, and their pretend apology two days later was sufficiently faux-humble that we'll "show compassion" and "forgive" them. Besides, someone else is here for me to vent my wrath on!

When we feel emotional, we ought to direct that in positive directions (help the victim, change the legal system to reduce false convictions, change the police culture) rather than negative ways (hang the perpetrator because I'm angry, dang it! Burn the mayor because it happened under his watch! Smash windows because Hulk smash!).

When we aren't feeling (overly) emotional, and balancing the pros and cons in a purely rational way, that's when we should adjust laws for punishments - bearing in mind all five (or more) of the things we are trying to balance for.

In this situation, are you saying we should raise the statue of limitations for torture, or only for torture-used-by-people-in-authority-to-get-confessions? And if the latter, is that only confessions that are proven false, or does that include confessions that are proven true (e.g. if the confession was for a kidnapping, and the confession correctly revealed the location of a kidnapped child who otherwise would've starved to death in the next few hours)?

It's also difficult to know what the perpetrators truly thought. Did they genuinely believe they had the person who committed murder? If so (and if we had evidence that they truly believed they had a murderer), should that belief reduce their sentence or not? Is torture in the pursuit of safe neighborhoods, puppies, and justice for all worse than, equal to, or less than torture in the pursuit of career advancement and simply reducing paperwork and footwork? Torture is torture, and ought to be punished... but to what extent do we punish it? Is self-interested torture worse than for-justice torture or worse than self-sacrificing torture?

How do we know the hearts and minds of those we are judging? By the very nature of not knowing what the perpetrator was thinking and feeling, and not knowing whether he has genuinely felt remorse, even if we have perfect 100% conviction of genuine guilty people, and perfect 0% conviction of innocent people, ALL laws will over-punish some guilty people and underpunish others, convicted for the same crime.

So, do we give more leeway to judges and let their internal biases have more effect, and let the judges be more open to manipulation by suave criminals and lawyers who are paid to pretty much lie through their teeth (something that's flawed with our system in general - lawyers of the defendants should be required to ensure justice is pursued, not to ensure guilty clients go free), or should we give less leeway to judges, reducing personal judge bias, but maximizing the reality that any law, no matter how fair, is custom-fit to the crime, and not the criminal committing the crime.

Human-guided injustice is imperfect. And will always be imperfect, until we can read criminal minds perfectly - both their present state, and the state of their mind during the crime.

I'm not saying justice was delivered here (I don't think anyone thinks that); I'm saying, it's freakin' hard for the law to deliver justice except in very broad inaccurate strokes.

Generally I think they make sense, and the length should vary by the crime.

But it is odd if the statute of limitations here was less than the 25 years that the victims were in prison for. Put it another way: if we accept that after time, people are rehabilitated even if they didn't get punished at all, why is it that in the US, people are locked up for decades?

In the United States, you have to actually be convicted of a crime to be legally punished ... Why exactly do so many folks believe certain individuals should be imprisoned / executed without legal trial ?

If the DOJ or Internal Affairs is too lazy to go after someone 40 years ago, why now? It's kind of like Germany going after a Nazi telegraph operator who is now in her 90's !

It makes sense outside "crime", and there is a very similar concept. There is the saying when a 90 year old dies: "I guess we can't blame the midwife for it". As often with such sayings, there is a lot of truth (and common sense) in that. There would be no end to senseless trials if every claim remained valid forever. The "you did not bother during the last 10 years, why now" defense is very valid. Except, when it comes to "crime", I think ther should be no free lunch, especially since it sometimes takes victims a long time to even step forward (think rape) or the victims may be entirely unable to do so (think murder) and it may take the police years to pin the culprit down. Double jeopardy is a similar thing. While the initial idea (protect the citizen from e.g. politically motivated infinite arrest-trial cycles, which is basically the same as being in prison for life) is a good intent, overall it is a very bad thing. It means that someone who is entirely guilty walks free for a trifle, and even if enough conclusive evidence is found thereafter to nail him down, he still walks free. Speaking of crime, the above example of not paying your tax is somewhat bad, I think. If you didn't pay your tax, you still owe the state money, and interest. But it is not a crime (factually, it is -- but it should not be). This is one of these examples of needlessly criminalizing the "good" citizen. There are people in Germany (the father of S. Graf being a prominent example) who spent more time in prison for not paying tax than some murderers. This cannot possibly be considered fair, but the length of the sentence is not where it ends. Criminalizing someone means in all likelihood that they lose their job and will be unable to get hired again. Not in any respectable job at all anyway, and often not in any other job either. If being caught cheating on your tax simply meant you have to pay your tax debt plus a small "extra fee" to account for the interest (say, three times your original tax debt) it would be better for everybody. A useful member of society remains a (now tax-paying) useful member of society instead of costing money to be emprisoned and living off wellfare afterwards. Plus, the state gets a little extra money. Win-win in every respect. That is true even more so as the taxation system is so deliberately complicated (apart from justifying a huge, decadent administrative machinery, my theory is that this done to ensure that practically every average citizen is guilty of something) that you must either hire a tax accountant or have a degree in that field, if you don't want to risk doing it incorrectly by accident.

That is true even more so as the taxation system is so deliberately complicated (apart from justifying a huge, decadent administrative machinery, my theory is that this done to ensure that practically every average citizen is guilty of something) that you must either hire a tax accountant or have a degree in that field, if you don't want to risk doing it incorrectly by accident.

Huh?

I likely live in another country than you, but I believe a tax system generally tries to be "fair". Simple systems like "everybody pays the same amount" don't exist because too many people would believe that is unfair, so rules are added to tune it towards "fairness". Do that a few decades, et voila, a big stack of rules to derive who pays how much, for every possible situation.

Also, I don't think anyone has a problem if you pay too much (except you perhaps :p ). The trouble is however that people want to squeeze all the rules to pay minimal amounts. At that point, you do indeed need to understand the rules deeply.

In this situation, are you saying we should raise the statue of limitations for torture, or only for torture-used-by-people-in-authority-to-get-confessions? And if the latter, is that only confessions that are proven false, or does that include confessions that are proven true (e.g. if the confession was for a kidnapping, and the confession correctly revealed the location of a kidnapped child who otherwise would've starved to death in the next few hours)?

That you have asked this question, seems to suggest that you support water boarding as was initiated during George Bush presidency? For me any information derived from torture is invalid irrespective of the outcome. Where do you draw the line? who plays God to determine when torture will reveal the location of the kidnapped child or whether it will force out a false confession?

In fact before that paragraph your analysis was very positively informative and intriguing.

It's also difficult to know what the perpetrators truly thought. Did they genuinely believe they had the person who committed murder? If so (and if we had evidence that they truly believed they had a murderer), should that belief reduce their sentence or not? Is torture in the pursuit of safe neighborhoods, puppies, and justice for all worse than, equal to, or less than torture in the pursuit of career advancement and simply reducing paperwork and footwork? Torture is torture, and ought to be punished... but to what extent do we punish it? Is self-interested torture worse than for-justice torture or worse than self-sacrificing torture?

It shouldn't matter what the perpetrators were thinking, In any civilised country there should be zero tolerance on extracting information through torture. There should be other humane means of extracting the truth,. With us humans always overly pushing the boundaries of what is legally possible, its a dangerous slippery slope.

but to what extent do we punish it?

all the way, maximum

How do we know the hearts and minds of those we are judging?

I doubt you will ask this question universally? Would you ask the same of a psychopath serial rapist? Maybe his parents dumped him on the streets at age 5 and he never had the parental guidance and family upbringing the rest of us had. So no one taught him there are boundaries to what you can do. On the streets if want something you just go and grab it, even if that action violates other people. No one graduating from the streets can be normal, so in their hearts and minds they see the world differently, can we truly judge them?

Actually, thinking about it now, my example of a child dumped on the streets at age 5 maybe a bad one. Because he does have a genuine excuse for turning out to be a criminal since your background (good parental upbringing, education, decent neighbourhood...) does affect how a person would turn out to be irrespective of the genes

But the general point remains - zero tolerance for extracting confession through torture.

Human-guided injustice is imperfect. And will always be imperfect, until we can read criminal minds perfectly - both their present state, and the state of their mind during the crime.

It is indeed imperfect. But most people only think this way if the elites (police included) cross the law. But when some "lowly street dudes" cross the law, its normally "3 strikes and you're out!"

There is another very important value in Statute Of Limitations: Costs and Logistics. Statute of limitation ensures that investigative resources can not be pressured into being 'wasted' on older cases with little to no chance of being solved or brought to trial, and it eases load on the judicial system by saving them from being pressured into trying to process old crimes of limited value.

Just think of the administrative nightmare it would be if all crimes stayed legally valid to investigate and prosecute. Not the load on the actual investigative resources, but the 'front desk' workload of someone calling to see how the progress is going on solving the crime of someone breaking their window 30 years ago, and then dealing with the flak if you try to say "That case is closed because we've had no evidence/whatever."