A Response to NYT Front Page Story on Saturday that the Vatican Was Considering Amending the Canon Law Statutes of Limitations for Child Sex Abuse

Marci A. Hamilton

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that Cardinal William J. Levada had floated the idea that the Vatican was considering revising the canon law statutes of limitations (”SOLs”) for child sex abuse. This is rich.

It’s yet another shell game. The Catholic hierarchy is desperately hoping everyone will focus on the Pope’s daily few words about the sexual abuse crisis, his meeting with 5 survivors (handpicked so that none was a leader in the grassroots movement in support of SOL reform), and now the deficiencies of all things, canon law. If everyone can just keep following the bouncing ball, maybe they won’t notice that we have learned a single, crucial lesson from the clergy abuse debacle: the statutes of limitations for child sex abuse are much too short in virtually every state. They shut victims out of court before they are ready to go and they offer the cloak of anonymity so that predators can abuse one child after another.

Levada apparently is hoping that no one will notice that there are two types of statutes of limitations and that the one he is talking about is irrelevant in American courts. Change them all you want, but you won’t aid survivors.

The hierarchy’s lawyers have invoked the civil, secular SOLs against survivors of clergy sex abuse in every conceivable case. Not only have the bishops instructed their lawyers to push the statutes of limitations in civil courts to the hilt, they have paid their lobbyists, the state Catholic Conferences, as well as prestigious independent lobbying firms, untold millions to lobby state legislators against civil SOL reform. As I detail in Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008), they have been a major force in opposition to the growing national grassroots movement to eliminate SOLs for child sex abuse in United States courts.

This is the issue — elimination of SOLs — that survivors and church reformers and other decent citizens have coalesced around in light of the many lessons taught by the clergy abuse scandals. And now Levada would mock that reform movement by suggesting that canon law reform is relevant or helpful.

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Marci A. Hamilton

Ignorance is the enemy of liberty. That truth has never been so forcefully made as it has been with the rescue of the hundreds of children from the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints compound in Eldorado, Texas.

As the clergy abuse crisis within the Roman Catholic Church has proved, Americans are all too willing to ignore evidence of child abuse when it occurs in the context of religious organizations. Until very recently, willed denial was the primary response to this devastating and systemic set of issues. Parents punished children who told them they had been sexually abused by priests, prosecutors declined to investigate, and newspapers failed to cover. Why? Because we as Americans just do not want to believe that religious groups are capable of such base behavior. As we succumb to the romanticism of religious liberty, we leave the vulnerable in desperate straits.

That is why the Supreme Court’s 1990 decision in Employment Div. v. Smith is both wise and necessary. In that case, the Court held that Native American Church members could not receive unemployment benefits if they used the illegal drug peyote, even if the drug was used during a church service. Why? Because “[o]ur cases do not, at their farthest reach, support the proposition that a stance of conscientious opposition relieves an objector from any colliding duty fixed by a democratic government.”

Some misguidedly criticized the decision, because it was purportedly based on “targeting” of the Native American Church. Religious and civil rights groups lobbied to enact the Religious Freedom Restoration Act to eliminate the Smith decision, because they argued that religious excuses should trump most “colliding” obligations. The children at risk in religious compounds prove how wrong they are.

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Marci has been very busy lately. After her Washington Post chat yesterday, she is now appearing in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Expect to hear more from her as she works towards justice for victims of sexual abuse, advocating the elimination of statutes of limitations and allowing victims to make their cases when they are ready.

A number of states have legislation pending like the legislation supported by Chesley that I mention in the following column published by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. He is part of the growing national grassroots movement to open courthouse doors to child sex abuse survivors.

Seeking justice for childhood victims
Al Chesley stands up to admit he’d been sexually abused — and to point out flaws in our laws
Wednesday, April 09, 2008

By Marci A. Hamilton

Al Chesley, a former standout linebacker at the University of Pittsburgh who went on to a notable professional career with the Philadelphia Eagles, broke through several barriers at once when he announced recently that he had been sexually abused as a teenager. At 50 years old and only after the death of his mother, he dramatically made the point that most survivors of childhood sex abuse need decades to come forward, at which time it can be too late to find justice.

Read the rest of the article here.

They are not very convincing, actually. Marci Hamilton takes a scathing look at how ridiculous some of them sound, especially to the victims of childhood sexual abuse.

Marci Hamilton

As the second half of Justice Denied: What America Must Do to Protect Its Children (Cambridge 2008) documents, there are powerful lobbies opposed to giving survivors of childhood sexual abuse their day in court. The most powerful are the insurance lobby and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church.

I work with many survivors of child sex abuse, who find the opposition’s arguments very painful. It is worth a moment to look at the arguments against Statutes of Limitations [SOL] reform from their eyes. (There are other arguments, including ones I have made, out there, but I want to focus for today on the survivors themselves.)

Here are three standard arguments made against SOL reform and the survivors’ response.

Opposition: In Colorado, some legislators were persuaded that SOL reform is a bad idea, because fewer people will serve on nonprofit boards due to increased liability for child abuse.

The survivors: Wait a minute—did you just say that the needs of voluntary board members of nonprofits are more important than justice for sex abuse survivors? And more important than identifying perpetrators to the public to protect children in the future? This is the sort of priority-setting that makes survivors feel almost as alienated as they feel when they learn that the SOL for their claims expired before they got to court.

Opposition: SOL reform will “bankrupt” the Roman Catholic Church.

From the Church’s survivors: So the current wealth of the Church – illustrated by the enormous and elaborate cathedral recently built in Los Angeles (which has been dubbed Taj Mahony after Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony) – is more important than bringing healing to the thousands of survivors of clergy abuse? From the incest survivors: What does the protection of your wealth have to do with me?

Opposition: SOL reform is all about obtaining money for greedy trial lawyers.

The survivors: Can you even see me over here? I’m the one bringing suit. I’m the one who needs vindication and my day in court. If it weren’t for the trial lawyers, who took these cases for years when the law was solidly against us, I would have no voice today.

If the opponents to SOL reform could hear how their arguments sound to the victims of child sex abuse, they might just come to understand how frivolous those arguments are when compared to the needs of sex abuse survivors.

I’m not saying they will – just suggesting they should.

Marci Hamilton is a top expert in US church-state relations. She is also involved in another passionate fight — the abolishing of Statues of Limitations for victims of childhood sexual abuse — laws which wind up protecting some of the most dangerous offenders.

She’ll be keeping us up to speed on important developments and decisions on Wednesdays.

A Crawford County, PA, prosecutor took the first steps toward charging a priest pedophile this week and then abruptly withdrew the charge. Why? Certainly not because of a failure of proof. The victim’s claims were credible, and the victim was very supportive of the prosecution. The reason was that the statute of limitations had run.

The prosecutor first filed the charges in light of a recent Pennsylvania law that had extended the date a survivor of child sexual abuse could file charges to age 50. The victim was under 50 and, therefore, the thought was that his criminal charges could be the basis for prosecution.

Unfortunately, the new Pennsylvania law did not and could not make it possible for him to file charges, because the statute of limitations on these crimes had expired long before the extension to age 50. And once a criminal statute of limitations runs, no amount of lawmaking will revive the claim, according to the United States Supreme Court in Stogner v. California.

So now what does this survivor do?

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