Is the Statute of Limitations Jurisdictional or Waivable?

Last week, I blogged about the lack of a statute of limitations for felony offenses in North Carolina. There is, of course, a two-year statute of limitations for misdemeanors, a matter that has been the subject of a fair amount of recent litigation. A reader posed an excellent question at the end of that post:  Is the statute of limitations a defense that may be waived or does a trial court lack jurisdiction over a time-barred offense? A recent case. As it turns out, that’s a question that courts across the country have wrestled for decades. Just last April, the Florida Supreme Court in State v. Smith, 241 So. 3d 53 (Fla. 2018), considered whether a defendant could seek relief on appeal from his conviction for a time-barred offense if he failed to raise the statute of limitations in the trial court. The Smith court concluded that though timely commencement of a prosecution was mandatory under its statute, a statute of limitations violation could be waived. Thus, the defendant in Smith, who was convicted of offenses that he alleged on appeal were time-barred, failed to preserve that issue for purposes of direct appeal. The Supreme Court’s take. Smith relied in part on the United States Supreme Court’s reasoning in Musacchio v. United States, ­­­___ U.S. ___, 136 S.Ct. 709, 718 (2016), a case in which the high court concluded that the five-year statute of limitations in 18 U.S.C. § 3282  provided a “nonjurisdictional defense, not a jurisdictional limit” and that a [...]