I'm sure there are many complicated reasons for such statutes. But not all crimes are subject to a statute of limitations.
Very serious crimes, like murder, typically have no statute of limitations. So I think to some degree it is reasonable to infer that an underlying impetus is to say "It's not worth pursuing this past a certain point."
I see that as twofold. One part letting people know they don't need to live their entire life in terror of an old parking ticket and one part husbanding limited societal resources.
The practice of declaring a person an outlaw who was no longer protected by the law was a means to say "You are so terrible, you don't deserve legal protection. Yet our system simply doesn't have the means to deal with you. We don't have the resources to track you down and put you to trial."
Outlaws could be killed out of hand by anyone and the killer was not going to be charged with murder.
We seem to have forgotten about how tenuous human survival was for so long. We seem to think the threat of extinction due to climate change is some radical new thing that we should be terrified by.
The reality is humans mostly lived on the brink. Starvation was a routine thing. Entire peoples being exterminated was commonplace.
There just wasn't the resources to track every little thing you did and try to take you to court over it decades later. We still only do that for extremely serious crimes.
We let the small stuff go at some point.
But that's only a "pass" if you did it a long time ago and stopped at some point. If you are still doing those things, your recent crimes can still be prosecuted and they sometimes will make an effort to show you are a repeat offender with a long history and put you away for a long time for that.
So sometimes they kind of do an end run around statutes of limitations if they think you don't really deserve a pass.
Like any human endeavor, it involves a judgement call and context matters.
Very serious crimes, like murder, typically have no statute of limitations. So I think to some degree it is reasonable to infer that an underlying impetus is to say "It's not worth pursuing this past a certain point."
I see that as twofold. One part letting people know they don't need to live their entire life in terror of an old parking ticket and one part husbanding limited societal resources.
The practice of declaring a person an outlaw who was no longer protected by the law was a means to say "You are so terrible, you don't deserve legal protection. Yet our system simply doesn't have the means to deal with you. We don't have the resources to track you down and put you to trial."
Outlaws could be killed out of hand by anyone and the killer was not going to be charged with murder.
We seem to have forgotten about how tenuous human survival was for so long. We seem to think the threat of extinction due to climate change is some radical new thing that we should be terrified by.
The reality is humans mostly lived on the brink. Starvation was a routine thing. Entire peoples being exterminated was commonplace.
There just wasn't the resources to track every little thing you did and try to take you to court over it decades later. We still only do that for extremely serious crimes.
We let the small stuff go at some point.
But that's only a "pass" if you did it a long time ago and stopped at some point. If you are still doing those things, your recent crimes can still be prosecuted and they sometimes will make an effort to show you are a repeat offender with a long history and put you away for a long time for that.
So sometimes they kind of do an end run around statutes of limitations if they think you don't really deserve a pass.
Like any human endeavor, it involves a judgement call and context matters.