That's not the main reason for statutes of limitation.
A statute of limitations is a law that forbids prosecutors from charging someone with a crime that was committed more than a specified number of years ago. The main purpose of these laws is to ensure that convictions are based upon evidence (physical or eyewitness) that has not deteriorated with time. [1]
[1]https://www.findlaw.com/criminal/criminal-law-basics/time-li...
Very serious crimes, like murder, typically have no statute of limitations. So I think to some degree it is reasonable to infer that an underlying impetus is to say "It's not worth pursuing this past a certain point."
I see that as twofold. One part letting people know they don't need to live their entire life in terror of an old parking ticket and one part husbanding limited societal resources.
The practice of declaring a person an outlaw who was no longer protected by the law was a means to say "You are so terrible, you don't deserve legal protection. Yet our system simply doesn't have the means to deal with you. We don't have the resources to track you down and put you to trial."
Outlaws could be killed out of hand by anyone and the killer was not going to be charged with murder.
We seem to have forgotten about how tenuous human survival was for so long. We seem to think the threat of extinction due to climate change is some radical new thing that we should be terrified by.
The reality is humans mostly lived on the brink. Starvation was a routine thing. Entire peoples being exterminated was commonplace.
There just wasn't the resources to track every little thing you did and try to take you to court over it decades later. We still only do that for extremely serious crimes.
We let the small stuff go at some point.
But that's only a "pass" if you did it a long time ago and stopped at some point. If you are still doing those things, your recent crimes can still be prosecuted and they sometimes will make an effort to show you are a repeat offender with a long history and put you away for a long time for that.
So sometimes they kind of do an end run around statutes of limitations if they think you don't really deserve a pass.
Like any human endeavor, it involves a judgement call and context matters.
The second is a historical incident that led to old "biometrics" being replaced with fingerprints as our default for identification. I've read about it previously and found this as the top result when doing a quick search (I will not vouch for its quality -- it is just evidence I am not making it up, plus enough info that you can go look for more if you find it interesting and want to know more).
How Look-Alike Leavenworth Prisoners Led To The Forensic Use Of Fingerprinting
https://www.kcur.org/show/central-standard/2015-12-15/how-lo...
The early part of the article makes the distinction between "unobjectionable" uses of facial recognition -- such as for secure facilities -- and facial recognition in public places generally. And it seems to me we are leaving out some important things when we discuss such things.
We are not talking about how our historical social norms and laws were rooted in a social reality that no longer exists. The world has changed radically in a short period of time and there are both upsides and downsides.
Historically, people lived in relatively small groups of close-knit people. Tribes. Small towns. Etc.
We mostly interacted with people we knew fairly well. This both provided some baseline security and also could be a prison from which you could not readily escape. Once labeled a "troublemaker" you would have a hard time living it down. People could easily frame you as the guilty party based on social expectation that it was typical behavior for you to do X.
It was hard to leave your place of origin and go elsewhere but if you could, you could potentially start over. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid might have successfully started over had they genuinely left their life of crime behind entirely after moving to South America. But they relapsed and it did not end well.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1997-01-19-19970191...
We have statutes of limitations on various crimes because we have this idea historically that if enough time passes, you should not be held responsible for stupid mistakes you made in your youth. People can change, if they are given the chance to change.
It's complicated because it is human nature that if you make it too easy to get a pass for bad behavior, then you actively encourage bad behavior. But if you make it impossible to redeem yourself and start anew, then you give people no reason to bother to even try.
One of the problems with trends like facial recognition is that we are veering increasingly towards a very unforgiving world where every little thing you do will haunt you forever and there will be records even if you might have forgotten the incident entirely.
Yes, this is motivated in part by the fact that really terrible people like to look for the cracks in the system. They like to actively exploit loopholes. They will happily take the deal that they can get a free do-over without having to prove themselves only to keep doing terrible things because nothing is really stopping them.
But hard cases make bad laws. Designing a world optimized to treat everyone like they are this worst case scenario causes a great many problems while solving relatively few.
In a world with 8 billion people (roughly) and international passports required to go anywhere, etc. we are increasingly being painted into a corner individually and this will soon start to really come back to bite us, if it hasn't already. If nothing else, it makes it harder to migrate as one practical response to climate change making some areas less hospitable.
We need to begin thinking more deeply and more broadly about the social context in which our laws and expectations developed, how the world has changed and how to find a path forward in this new reality that isn't overly paranoid, overly controlling, etc.