For the most part, the cases were for small-scale offenses committed many years ago.
She added that "honour" crimes have sometimes been committed many years after a woman's release.
There too, men are being tried for dreadful crimes committed many years ago, in this case in 1971, during Bangladesh's war of independence from Pakistan.
After today's hearing, Mr Grieve said: "It is right that sexual crimes, whether committed many years ago or more recently, should be punished appropriately".
"A warning given for a relatively trivial offence committed many years ago by a child, who has not reoffended, has no relevance to how that person could be safely employed to work as an adult".
So up they came, five floors, and explained to Piper (who was still in her pajamas, working from home) that she had been indicted in federal court for crimes they said she committed many years before in an international drug ring.
Tony Webster is forced to revise his own memories, and the stories he tells about himself, when he discovers an act of cruelty towards his friends that he committed many years before: "What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed".
Dr Beate Dreike of the German department at Cork University says Schlink's fiction is a sophisticated critique of the limits of the law, and that for some crimes, particularly those committed many years ago, the law is an inadequate instrument of justice.
This opens the floodgates to frivolous suits over supposed wrongs committed many years ago, even if memories have grown cold and some of the parties are dead.
The forfeiture provision could have a significant effect on the pension benefits of a public employee convicted of a crime committed many years earlier.
