It's looking like the shortest limitation period I could find is 10 years.
So, if you want to commit murder you should live
in Djibouti.
Thank you to Dashlane for sponsoring this video.
New Year's.
I don't know what it is about the earth completing another rotation around the Sun but there's
something about New Year's that makes anything seem possible.
That wipes away the past and leaves a clean slate for the future.
Never went to the gym?
Now you can.
Ate like a raccoon in a garbage dump?
Time for a balanced diet.
Procrastinated you're days away?
Well... maybe not that.
But as much as I love a clean slate
I have to ask... do we always deserve one?
So I watched a lot of cop
shows growing up. I still do. Maybe that's why I'm a narc. But one thing that has
always confused me is statutory limitations for crimes.
If you don't know a statute of limitation is just this time limit for anyone involved in an
incident to start the legal process.
So, for example, if you want to sue a dog for
pooping on your lawn but you wait too long..
You can't sue. And this makes sense
because, one: I don't think you could sue dogs but also, two: if you really cared
about the lawn poop you would have acted sooner.
Limitations stop people from acting on old beef.
But what I don't understand is why they should count for crimes.
Like, if you broke the law you should be accountable forever right?!
But limitations for crimes exist - meaning if you are not charged with a crime in a
certain amount of time, then you are just not criminally responsible anymore.
You could go up to a cop and be like, "hey you know that crime from a while ago?
I did it!"
and they couldn't do anything about it.
The only reason I can imagine this
exists is because of time constraints like at some point cops need to
prioritize new crimes; so, the law sets time limits.
But because I am often wrong
I have decided to try and find the correct answer.
Here is the real reason
why crimes expire
So before we can actually figure out why something is happening, it's important to
know what is happening. Like the actual conditions required for a crime to
expire. Unfortunately, laws are not the same around the world.
But I didn't really think this was a problem, I thought I could just google it like
country crime statute of limitations badda-bing.
I got nothing.
I really thought that there was some nerd out there who had already compiled every
country and their statutes of limitation, but nope, so now I get to be that nerd!
I am going to read every single Penal Code and/or criminal code of procedure for
every country... in the world...
for this video. Let's do it.
It's looking like the shortest limitation period I could find this 10 years.
So, if you want to commit murder... you should live in Djibouti.
Production value!
Okay I'd like you to meet my son. His name is statute of limitations for
murder worldwide and he is beautiful!
Uhm, let's just..
There we go.
So basically this is a database that contains the names of most countries
except except for Greenland I forgot about Greenland.
My bad.
It also has the length of the limitation period for intentional homicide.
Now you might be thinking:
intentional homicide seems unnecessarily specific
but that's because you didn't spend the last three days reading penal codes
Basically homicide means killing someone in any way. It could be an accident, it could be
self-defense but if somebody dies you've committed homicide!
On the other hand, intentional homicide - although a bunch of different countries have
different names for it - but it basically means you intended to homicide.
So there are two main reasons why I chose to record the limitation period for
intentional homicide.
One: doing all of the limitation periods would be really
hard and I'm lazy.
And number two: in my personal opinion, but also in like
legally speaking, intentional homicide is one of the worst crimes you could do,
Short of international crimes like terrorism and genocide which like don't
have limitation periods.
But anyway if a country is putting an expiration date on
murder, it's kind of fair to assume that they're putting an expiration date on
every other crime as well.
But just a list of countries and their limitation
periods isn't enough because we're trying to figure out why we're trying to
find this fundamental reason. So, I dropped in a couple of other variables
to consider. Maybe they're important, maybe they're not!
The most interesting one I think is this variable - primary colonizer - because I know that
Canada used to be a British colony and that is the reason for a few very
distinct differences between us and the US, who did not like the British.
So thanks to this really cool dataset by a man named Paul, I was able to find the
primary colonizer of most countries.
So I popped it into some code.
Look how beautiful it is look look how cool this is!
This is what the world looks like
according to their limitation periods for intentional homicide
the darker the color, the longer the period. And if you're seeing a bit of a
historical geographic pattern, you're not wrong. If we do a bit of a YouTube rewind
and compare this to the graph of the top five colonizers and their colonies:
Do you see the pattern?
The primary colonizer tends to influence
the limitation length of their colonies.
French colonies are commonly ten years
Spanish: 20,
Turkish: 25,
Russian: 30,
and the UK: limitless.
And this historical
influence doesn't stop there, which shouldn't surprise me but it does.
I guess I just always kind of assumed that the law was more reactive to modern
climates. But, at least with limitation laws, that doesn't seem to be the case.
In fact, it was only up until pretty recently when modern countries like
Japan and South Korea finally abolished their statutes of limitation for murder.
So knowing how important the role that history and culture plays in limitation
laws, I wanted to trace this back as far as I
could go - to the first official limitation law.
And that means:
The library!
Anyway I love libraries! I used to go all the time when I was a kid but
then I stopped reading because school crushed my spirit, but it's wild that
there's just so many books that you could just read... for free!
So I got reading.
So here's what I learned.
The earliest limitation law that I could find came
from the Romans, and it had to do with ownership.
It used to be that when you
owned something your ownership was legally protected forever.
Sure, you could trade that ownership away in this weirdly extra process called mancipatio which
involved like five witnesses, a pair of scales, another dude dedicated to just
holding those scales, and a copper ingot.
If you didn't want to do that, person A
could still just have a little trade with person B - it's just that ownership
would legally remain with person A and this made ownership disputes really
confusing and unfair to person B.
So, in 424 AD, the Roman Emperor Theodosius II
was like: "If it isn't in your possession for 30 years, it is not yours anymore!"
And that was it! That was where it started.
Limitation laws were set up to
simplify the legal process, which I kind of guessed
But more importantly, they
exist to make things fair for all parties because that is what they are
ultimately about... fairness.
There's this quote that came up a whole bunch while I
was looking for this answer - the reason why crimes expire. It goes like this:
That, is the real reason. Whether or not you're innocent you have a right to a fair
trial and that means accurate evidence. It's really hard to defend yourself if
that just doesn't exist.
But there is this one other reason, it's the reason
that confused me when I was learning about limitations in the first place and
it's that: yeah, if you are guilty but the limitation expires, you get a second chance.
It just took me days of research to realize that... that isn't necessarily a bad thing.
In his book "Reasons and Persons", the
philosopher Derek Parfit put it this way:
Now I'm not saying that they should apply in all cases, I still think crimes
are bad and some crimes are unforgivable - no matter how much you've changed and no
matter how sorry you are.
But... it creates this subtle distinction for me.
A statute of limitation isn't forgiveness it isn't even really a free pass,
it's a responsibility.
It's a responsibility for officers of the law to work quickly and
it's a responsibility for guilty parties.
They have been granted a clean slate
but they can never dirty it again.
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