Year and a day rule

The rule was abolished by the Law Reform (Year and a Day Rule) Act 1996. English and Welsh law and Northern Irish law is now substantially revised such that if a specific act can be proved to be the cause of death, it can now potentially constitute murder regardless of the intervening time. The abolition of the rule does not relieve the prosecution of its obligation to prove, in cases of murder, that the accused intended to cause either death or serious injury.

The permission of the Attorney General for England and Wales or Attorney General for Northern Ireland is required for any prosecution in which it is alleged that the death occurred more than three years after the causative act, or when the offender has previously been convicted of an offence in connection with the death.

New Zealand had a year and a day rule until it was abolished unanimously in March 2018.[1]

• In 1891, the rule was upheld at the federal level in Ball v. United States.[2]
• In 1987, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, the highest local court in Washington, DC, rejected the year-and-a-day-rule in United States v. Jackson.[2][3]
• In 2001, the Supreme Court of the United States held that a Tennessee court's retroactive abolition of the rule was constitutional in Rogers v. Tennessee.[2]

The rule's common law status has been successfully used by defendants to overturn convictions as recently as 2003: the Supreme Court of Wisconsin upheld the year and a day rule in the case before it, but simultaneously abolished the rule for any later cases, noting the modern circumstances of homicide cases, in which there is "the specter of a family's being forced to choose between terminating the use of a life-support system and allowing an accused to escape a murder charge" and the court's finding that it is "unjust to permit an assailant to escape punishment because of a convergence of modern medical advances and an archaic rule from the thirteenth century".[4]

In California, the "year and a day" rule has been changed to a "three years and a day" rule.[5] If a death occurs more than three years and one day after the act alleged to have caused it, there is "a rebuttable presumption that the killing was not criminal", but the prosecution may seek to overcome this presumption.[6]

In 2014, the D.C. rule (as it existed in 1981) was one of the reasons given for why John Hinckley, the attempted assassin of President Ronald Reagan, could not be prosecuted for the murder of James S. Brady. The medical examiner listed the cause of death for Brady as bullets fired 33 years earlier.[2][7]

The following countries are listed in the Report on the Year and a Day Rule in Homicide with the observation that "the rule has never applied":[5]

• Austria
• France
• Germany
• Greece
• Italy
• Poland
• Scotland

  The report also said “It was held in H.M. Advocate v Stewart that the Crown may be barred from proceeding with a trial if it would be oppressive for them to do so in view of the passage of time since the discovery of the offence."

• South Africa

• England and Wales, Northern Ireland

  See the main introduction above.

• Republic of Ireland

  The rule was abolished “for all purposes” including "for the purposes of offences involving the death of a person, and for the purpose of determining whether a person committed suicide" by the section 38 of the Criminal Justice Act 1999.[8]

• Hong Kong

  The rule was abolished “for all purposes" in Hong Kong by s.33C of Offences Against the Person Ordinance (added by Ordinance No.32 of 2000) following the recommendation of the Law Commission of Hong Kong; the Commission did not consider it necessary to set a time limit beyond which prosecutions required the consent of the Secretary of Justice.[9]