Introduction

The Year-and-a-Day Rule

Introduction

A defendant can be the undisputed cause of a death and still escape a homicide charge, because the victim lingered too long between the injury and the death. That outcome looks strange against everything the causation inquiry normally asks. Yet at common law, homicide liability attached only if the victim died within one year and one day of the injury or wound the defendant inflicted. If the death came after that period expired, the prosecution could not charge homicide, even when the defendant's conduct clearly satisfied but-for causation.¹

The rule makes sense once you place it in the sequence of causation questions you already know. Cause in fact comes first and asks whether the death would have occurred without the defendant's act. Proximate cause comes second and asks whether the law should hold the defendant responsible for that result, given the events that followed the act. The time limit is a separate gate that sits on top of both steps. It looks only at elapsed time between injury and death, so a prosecutor who proves cause in fact and proximate cause still loses the homicide charge if the period has run. No showing on the earlier steps can revive it.

This chapter takes the rule in four stages. It begins by stating the rule and showing how the bar operates, including how the period is counted. It then examines the reasons the common-law courts adopted a fixed limit, traces the rule's decline in legislatures and courts, and considers how the Supreme Court has treated a court's decision to abolish it. It ends with a method for working through a fact pattern in which the victim dies long after the injury. The first step is to see exactly what the rule forbids and when, which is the subject of the next section.