ex post facto

“This is a violation of the ex post facto clause of the constitution,” said Neama Rahmani, president of West Coast Trial Lawyers.

As for the claim of ex post facto justice, Robert Jackson — the American prosecutor who believed aggression enabled all the other war crimes that followed — summed up the charge:

The ban on ex post facto laws, the court said, prohibits increasing the punishment for a crime after the crime was committed, and that it does not apply in the inmates’ cases.

Because genocide became an official crime only after the Nuremberg trials, Germany decided in 1949 that charging former Nazis with this crime would amount to ex post facto law.

So many shows rely on studio interviews or guests recapping their adventures ex post facto — the equivalent of Aunt Jane prattling on about her trip to Tuscany over the phone.