Retroactivity. What is the law: do you know? What should be the law?

[Boojatta]

On 23 May conscientious objector Georgios Koutsomanolakis was sentenced to a suspended 24-month prison term for insubordination by the Military Court of Athens. Koutsomanolakis was charged with insubordination in 1979, at a time when there was no alternative civilian service in Greece, because as a Jehovah’s Witness he refused to serve military service on religious grounds. He fled Greece and was granted political asylum in Germany, where he has been living since then. He was arrested and detained on 12 May 2005 on the Greek island of Rhodes during a visit to his parents and on 16 May he was transferred to Korydallos prison, Athens, where he remained imprisoned until his trial.

I promise to try to track down the website source for the above when I have time.

Could the above happen in the USA? In other words, if a law in the USA is revised to conform with international treaties, then can someone who was convicted under the old law be imprisoned even though the new law doesn't criminalize the conduct that violated the old law?

[TechBear_Seattle]

1. Yes

A person commits a criminal act and is convicted for that act. The law latter changes to make the act not a criminal act. Unless the law was written to automatically include amnesty, the sentence itself remains unchanged.

Usually in such cases, amnesty is included; I believe that is what was done for draft dodgers from the Vietnam war. Otherwise, the person would have to get a new trial and have the conviction overturned.

[Boojatta]

2. Could you provide references to back up your claim?

Also, what do you think about the legal situation that you described. If the law isn't written to include amnesty, then should the convicted person face continued or subsequent imprisonment?

[TechBear_Seattle]

3. No sources, just recall from high school

I had AP government and AP history, both with excellent teachers who pressed their students to go beyond text books and "accepted" material.

One of the projects we had in the government class covered the idea of "ex post facto," a process of making something retroactively a criminal offense (prohibited by the Constitution; see Article I, Section 9.) Some of my classmates did a paper on whether or not it was also prohibited to make criminal offenses retroactively non-criminal offenses. I'm remembering what they presented.