Marci Hamilton

The AP reported Friday that former Congressman Mark Foley, who was accused in 2006 of sending sexually suggestive email messages to underage congressional pages will not be prosecuted in part because Florida’s statute of limitations on such crimes is a mere 3 years. The vast majority of child victims do not come forward at all, and the others rarely come forward before the statutes of limitations on sex crimes expire. This is another example of why the criminal (and civil) statutes of limitations on child sex crimes need to be eliminated.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley won’t face state or federal criminal charges for allegedly sending salacious computer messages to underage male pages, in part because authorities couldn’t prove the authenticity of the chats, officials said Friday. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement also noted in an investigative report that too much time had passed since the February 2003 messages to bring any charges.

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Marci Hamilton has fought for the abolishment of statutes of limitations [SOL] pertaining to childhood sexual abuse.

The SOLs limit the time that the abused have to take an abuser to court. They usually expire before people molested as children are ready to talk about what happened. This hit close to home recently, as Jewish Week reports.

Joel Engelman was 8 years old the first time he was summoned to the principal’s office at his Satmar school in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Not knowing what he might have done to provoke the call, Joel was nervous, as his principal, Rabbi Avrohom Reichman, had a reputation for being strict.

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ABC News Faith Matters

Marci Hamilton and Mark Chopko

Justice Denied author Marci Hamilton debates Mark Chopko, Attorney of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops on civil Statues of Limitations — the focus of her book. Click the image to watch! Link opens in a new window.

Pennsylvania is the latest battleground in the reform of Statutes of Limitations for child abusers.

Read her on FindLaw every Thursday

Marci Hamilton

There is a national grassroots movement to eliminate the civil and criminal statutes of limitations (SOLs) on child sex abuse. Why? Because survivors of such abuse typically take decades to come forward. There was a time when most states had extremely predator-friendly SOLs like Alabama’s current limit of 2 years from the date of the event (yes, an abused 7-year-old must get a lawyer by the age of 9 in Alabama).

A handful of states have abolished the civil and criminal statutes of limitations altogether, e.g., Alaska, Maine, and Delaware. Some do not impose such limitations on felonies in criminal prosecutions while others set a wide variety of limits in civil cases, with Alabama coming in at 2 years from the event, other states giving victims 2 years from the age of majority (18), and a few others, establishing more generous deadlines. Suffice it to say that the vast majority of victims do not win the race against the SOLs and are shut out of the courthouses.

The movement for abolition is relatively new, though states have been gradually lengthening SOLs in this arena for years. In most states, the legislatures have set a limit at one point in time and then been faced with the next awful case, where the predator is immune due to the statute of limitations, spurring further extension. Basic justice has been driving these seriatim extensions.

California and Delaware have enacted “window legislation,” which suspends even expired civil SOLs for a year or two to give victims an opportunity to come forward. Without this civil window legislation, we have an army of predators who have never been publicly identified and who continue to abuse most happily under a blanket of anonymity.
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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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