Ex Post Facto

Derived from the Latin of “after the fact”, ‘ex post facto’ refers to laws or clauses that provide for the infliction of punishment upon a person for some prior act that, at the time it was committed, was not illegal. Ex post facto legislation retroactively changes the rules or sufficiency of evidence or criminal penalty in any given case. Ex post facto laws in America are prohibited by Article I, Section 10, Clause 1, of the U.S. Constitution. The US Supreme Court Case of Collins v. Youngblood, made it illegal for a Texas new statute to be applied retroactively, allowing an appellate court to reform an improper verdict, where the result was that a defendant who was improperly sentenced to both a fine and prison term, was denied the right to a new trial and instead resentenced just to a prison term. The court held that the defendant’s right to new trial was a substantial right to be protected. Another aspect of the ex post facto clause is that the standards and procedure for proving the defendant’s guilt cannot be made more lenient towards the prosecutor than the procedure that existed at the time that the defendant committed the charged offense. Furthermore, a defendant cannot be more severely punished if he/she committed a crime and the punishment for that crime is subsequently increased. The legislature does occasionally create laws that are effective retroactively. However, when the legislature expresses this intent in the law, it can only do so to make the punishment less severe for the defendant or the procedure for finding guilt more restrictive to the prosecutor. Ultimately, not all courts agree on whether retroactive changes to laws or sentencing violate the ex post facto clause. For example, sex offender registration laws, or community notification laws, are often accepted because they do not provide for retroactive additional incarceration. However, their critics argue that they do provide additional consequences for a sex offender that did not exist at the time the offense was committed. The general consensus among courts has been that such laws do not violate the ex post facto clause, because, in part, the requirement is defined as civil regulation and that these statutes are enacted for the protection of the public, which itself is an exception to ex post facto prohibition. If you believe that you are a victim of an ex post facto law, we invite you to consult with an experienced Walk Free Law attorney immediately.