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Year and a day rule

Definition

A bright-line, common law rule that a person cannot be convicted of homicide for a death that occurs more than a year and a day after his or her act(s) that allegedly caused it. The rule arose from the difficulty of determining cause of death after an extended period of time. Like most common law principles, state legislatures or courts may modify or abolish this rule.

Illustrative caselaw

See, e.g. Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U.S. 451 (2001).

See also

 

 

On March 15, Jim slips poison into Steve's drink.  Steve survives after medical treatment but has to fight off many infections because of a weakened immune system.  On June 5 of the following year, Steve dies from the flu.

Prosecutors charge Jim with second degree murder, but the trial court dismisses the charge because of the state's year and a day rule.  Because Steve died more than a year and a day after Jim poisoned him, no homicide charges can be brought. 

Prosecutors appeal to the highest court in the state, but that court affirms the trial court's holding.  Because of the rule's long history in the state, the court refuses to abolish it retroactively.  The court suggests that the legislature might wish to re-examine the rule and abolish it going forward.

"This case concerns the constitutionality of the retroactive application of a judicial decision abolishing the common law 'year and a day rule.'  At common law, the year and a day rule provided that no defendant could be convicted of murder unless his victim had died by the defendant's act within a year and a day of the act. . . .  The Supreme Court of Tennessee abolished the rule as it had existed at common law in Tennessee and applied its decision to petitioner to uphold his conviction.  The question before us is whether, in doing so, the court denied petitioner due process of law in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment."

"There is . . . nothing to indicate that the Tennessee court's abolition of the rule in petitioner's case represented an exercise of the sort of unfair and arbitrary judicial action against which the Due Process Clause aims to protect.  Far from a marked and unpredictable departure from prior precedent, the court's decision was a routine exercise of common law decisionmaking in which the court brought the law into conformity with reason and common sense. It did so by laying to rest an archaic and outdated rule that had never been relied upon as a ground of decision in any reported Tennessee case."

Rogers v. Tennessee, 532 U.S. 451, 453, 466-67 (2001).