Abatement ab initio

Abatement ab initio, Latin for from the beginning, is a common law doctrine holding that the death of a defendant who is appealing a criminal conviction extinguishes the entire criminal proceeding against that defendant, from the original indictment through the conviction itself, as though it had never occurred. In the United States, the doctrine was extended by the Supreme Court's 1971 decision in Durham v. United States to cases where a petition for certiorari review was still pending, while the Court's 1976 decision in Dove v. United States excluded discretionary appeals from the doctrine's reach. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/