In connection with the reopening of the case of the murder of PC Keith Blakelock, Matthew Syed asks (£) whether justice is served by pursuing people who committed crimes decades ago.
It seems to me that when it comes to the most serious crimes there is only one possible answer – an unambiguous yes. We should acknowledge the legal obstacles and moral difficulties, but we should also press ahead with prosecutions, however belated. This is not just about delivering justice upon past crimes; it is about deterring future ones.
He also discusses the issue with reference to the pursuit of ageing Nazi war criminals today, writing:
Neither does time diminish the horrors of what happened in Nazi Germany. Some have argued that it is tasteless to haul octogenarians or nonagenarians before a judge, but it would be a far greater affront to natural justice to turn a blind eye, even when the suspect is nearing the end of life.
I agree with Syed about this, and I would agree with him even if there were empirical evidence to suggest that trying people for crimes committed a very long time ago had no deterrent effect whatsoever. As a matter of fact, in international law as it stands there is no statute of limitations on war crimes and crimes against humanity and this is as it should be. In my view there are at least two reasons why.
The first is a simple reason of retributive justice. A person who has committed grave crimes against others and so far gone unpunished stands in a relation to their victims of unrecompensed wrongdoing. It doesn’t matter how old they are. Other things equal, we can only assume a continuity of moral identity between the criminal (against humanity) of yesterday and the unpunished old man or woman of today. If the latter goes to his or her grave without having been brought to justice, a terrible wrong remains unrectified. He or she gets away with it, as we say, and their advanced age hasn’t altered a thing in that regard.
Second, from a societal point of view, there is a declarative as well as retributive dimension to not forgetting a crime just because it is an old one. We announce by not forgetting, by continuing to pursue the culprit(s), that the crime is so grave that nothing apart from due process and consequent judgement can ‘clean’ it in the public record, that as a community we show no tolerance towards the material act that constitutes this crime, irrespective of how long ago it was committed.