I’m taking a few days away, but I was surprised, as many no doubt were, to hear reports that the former Prince Andrew, now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, was arrested by British police this morning. It’s a good time to note the quirks — as they will seem to Americans — of the United Kingdom’s justice system: in this instance, the lack of a statute of limitations for major crimes.

The charges are apparently related to suspicion that Mountbatten-Windsor passed sensitive government information to Jeffrey Epstein when he was a British trade envoy over 15 years ago. (While suspicions about Andrew’s involvement in the deceased pedophile’s sex-trafficking orbit have been the cause of his fall from grace and the stripping of his royal titles, they are reportedly not the subject of the ongoing criminal investigation.)

In the United States, and particularly at the federal level, crimes are statutory: Congress creates them and, to nearly all of them, applies a statute of limitations (SOL). There are exceptions, such as murder (no SOL), but most federal felonies must be charged within five years of the conduct alleged or the case will be thrown out as stale on a motion by the defense.

England is a common-law system: serious criminal offenses were defined over centuries of jurisprudence, not by statute. The offense for which Mountbatten-Windsor is apparently under investigation is called misconduct in office. It is a common-law crime that has no SOL. Hence, although the alleged occurrence of the conduct at issue over 15 years ago would make this kind of corruption case impossible to bring in the U.S., it is viable in the U.K.

Misconduct in office is not an easy crime to prove. The prosecution has to show that a person was a public officer, that he committed misconduct, that this misconduct amounted to an abuse of public trust, and that the matter was sufficiently serious to be deemed a criminal offense. The last two elements, in particular, are subject to a lot of judicial interpretation.

Sentencing is complicated, too. There are no maximum or minimum sentences for common-law crimes, but the Brits have a fairly extensive system of sentencing guidelines; where those guidelines set ranges for analogous crimes (say, fraud), they can be argued by analogy at the time of sentencing and on appeal. Ergo, despite the fact that an offense, if proofed, could theoretically result in a sentence of life imprisonment, the sentences actually imposed are lighter — generally, much lighter.

As I understand it, the former prince has not been formally charged at this time.

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