Exceptionally heinous crimes, such as murder, usually have no time limit within which the public prosecutor must initiate legal proceedings. But not in Korea. Instead, murder has a 25-year time limit, a legacy from the Japanese criminal procedure code, which Korea reportedly copied nine years after liberation from Japan’s colonial rule.

Now the Ministry of Justice is in the process of revising the criminal procedure code aimed at abolishing the time limit. The ministry, which is set to finish collecting expert opinions by July 23, says it will submit a revision bill to the Cabinet thereafter for deliberation and approval. It expects the criminal procedure code will be revised when the National Assembly sits for its 100-day regular session in September.

The time limit for murder had remained 15 years until it was extended to 25 years in December 2007. The 10-year extension was a stopgap measure taken by the ministry with parliamentary approval, which had been under mounting public pressure to scrap the time limit.

Triggering the public resentment against the time limit were the disappearance of five children in Daegu on March 26, 1991, who were later found to have been killed, and the raping and killing of 10 women in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi Province, over the period from Sept. 15, 1986, to April 3, 1991. The time limit for the murder of the children was over on March 25, 2006, and that for the killing of the last of the 10 women on April 2 the same year.

The fact that the criminal or criminals that killed the five children, who had set out from their village to collect salamander eggs, would not be brought to justice renewed public anger when their remains, buried at a mountainside, were discovered 11 and a half years after their disappearance. A large number of parents signed up to have the time limit repealed for murder when the criminal investigations were stopped after 25 years.

A general public consensus has since been building that the time limit for murder will have to be removed if justice is to be appropriately administered. In a nation where more than 1,000 murder cases are reported each year, murderers cannot be allowed to freely roam the streets just because the time limit on their cases has passed.

One of the reasons for time limits, which are set in the statute of limitations in a common-law legal system and known as periods of prescription in civil-law systems, is that “evidence can be corrupted or disappear, memories fade and crime scenes are changed.” In other words, the facts become obscure through the passage of time.

Cited as another reason is people’s desire to “get on with their lives” instead of having the past legal battles come up all of a sudden. A time limit is a defense for a defendant who wishes to defeat an action brought against him after the appropriate time has passed.

But one exception to time limits is murder in many countries. The reason is that the crime is considered exceptionally heinous by society. No wonder, the proposal to repeal the 25-year time limit for murder has rapidly been gaining momentum in Korea, too.

Of course, there are a sizable number of people opposed to the proposal. They argue that the time limit should be maintained, precisely because evidence is susceptible to damage and memories of witnesses tend to lapse as time passes. They also claim the fugitive life of a murderer during the time limit could be tantamount to the actual punishment for the crime he committed. Moreover, they say, it would cost too much to continue investigations indefinitely until the murderer is brought to justice.

But their opposition is set wide apart from the sentiment of the general public, which wonders why the time limit for murder should be maintained when those for the sexual abuse of children aged 12 or younger and handicapped people have already been abolished. Few would claim murder is any less heinous than the crime of sexually abusing children or handicapped people. It certainly is past time for the nation to abolish the time limit for murder.