When crimes can continue indefinitely, is there a limit to how frequently it can be prosecuted?

Question

Crimes such as possession of drugs and weapons, or speeding, can continue for long periods of time if not interupted.

If evidence of the crimes comes to light later, what sort of rules limit the count of convictions that can be made?

For instance if illegal drugs are possesed for a long time, can that be more than one count of posession? What if the same drugs are posessed, discarded, and then picked up again?

Or if a weapon is illegally posessed in a public place, can there be a separate count each time the defendant goes into the public place?

If somoene speeds in a motor vehicle over a long distance can that give rise to multiple speeding offences?

I've posed multiple questions here but I'm curious about the general principles that may apply, hence posting as one question.

Answer 1

For instance if illegal drugs are possessed for a long time, can that be more than one count of possession?

Generally, a continuous period of possession would be one count, and in practice, usually only an instance when someone is caught red handed in possession is usually charged.

What if the same drugs are possessed, discarded, and then picked up again?

In theory, that could be an issue. In practice, it almost never comes up as only the possession at the time of a search or arrest is charged in the vast majority of cases.

Or if a weapon is illegally possessed in a public place, can there be a separate count each time the defendant goes into the public place?

Usually, a continuous period of possession would be charged as a single count.

Also, in sentencing, when there are multiple counts, sentences for multiple counts arising from the same nucleus of facts and circumstances, call it the same course of action or event, are usually served concurrently, so that only the longest sentence matters, rather than consecutively, although there are exceptions, for example, in cases where there are multiple victims of certain violent crimes.

If someone speeds in a motor vehicle over a long distance can that give rise to multiple speeding offenses?

Speeding is almost always charged as a single offense at the time someone is stopped for it, in practice. Someone on a long trip who is stopped multiple times (often in different states) could get multiple speeding citations, in multiple stops, however.

Answer 2

new-zealand

That is what the term "representative charge" is for.

Similar charges may be joined ("amalgamated") into one representative charge, or a representative charge may be divided into separate ones (s 21). Whatever the court sees fit.

Answer 3

Jeffrey M. Chemerinsky, a US Attorney and former Federal Prosecutor wrote about almost exactly this question in the USA in "Counting Offenses".

It's a 38 page document, so I won't attempt to paraphrase it in full here, but I can give some gists taken from reading it as a non-lawer / non-expert and non-American. The document is free to download from Duke.

Counting offences matters because among other things it has implications for sentencing, double jeopardy, and triggering specific statutes about repeat offending.

The starting point seems to be that any continuous un-interrupted act is a single offence, and can only be charged as one offence. In some cases an act can be divided and successfully charged as multiple offences, but there is not any great consistently applied rationale for how to do so. There are many cases where the division of course of conduct into multiple offences for charging has been disputed and courts have ruled in various ways.

When a statute specifically sets a "unit of prosecution" then the courts can follow that, as in the case of "a statute that made each day of practicing medicine without a license its own crime". But it is extremely rare that legislators specify a unit in this way.

Chemerinsky does not mention a specific case of illegally possessing a weapon for a long time, but he talks about the case of In re Snow, where the Supreme Court determined that a long period of illegal cohabitation should be charged as only a single offence. And Chemerinsky considers a hypothetical cases of a gun being illegally possessed for a year and concludes that "[convicting one count for each week and thus] sentencing this defendant to 260 years in prison [would violate the Eighth Amendment]".

There is no discussion of speeding offences, but there is discussion of Foley v. Commonwealth in which the Court of Appeals of Kentucky "held that multiple convictions for fleeing and evading law enforcement violated the prohibition on double jeopardy", as the court ruled "that fleeing or evading, under circumstances as occurred in this case, is a single continuous act, regardless of how many police officers may be considered to have given an order to stop.”"

Many of the crimes where this has been an issue have been violent crimes, which is something that I didn't consider in my question.

It seems that generally repeated violent acts done effectively continuously in a very short time frame, all of the same type and for the same reasons, in the same event, and without interruption may only be charged as a single offence, while acts that are spread over a longer time, or with some interruption between them, or where there was a so-called "a fork in the road" "giving the defendant a chance to stop and reconsider his" separating acts, then acts before and after the "fork" can be charged as separate offences. But there seems to be a lot of uncertainty and inconsistency in how courts have dealt with this between different cases.

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Jeffrey M. Chemerinsky, Counting Offenses, 58 Duke Law Journal 709-746 (2009)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/dlj/vol58/iss4/4

Answer 4

germany

The German terms are Tatmehrheit and Gesamtstrafe. Multiple crimes can be judged concurrently, the sentence will fall between the highest individual penalty and the sum of all penalties.

Answer 5

new-jersey

A parking ticket, for the same offense, cannot be issued more than once a day. In fact, I don't believe if 2 tickets are issued, both can be entered into the computer system tracking them.