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Extending Statutes of Limitation
April 1, 2006
Catholic World Report
Charles Lane
In 2002 the Catholic community was shocked with the sober realization that the Church suffers from a deep and festering problem. Over the course of a year stories of clergy sexual abuse and intentional cover-up by bishops steadily marched into the homes of churchgoers who were mystified by the sheer scope and tragedy of the abuse. Something had gone terribly wrong.
Since 2002, more and more victims have come forward to tell their stories, not only about the initial victimization, but also a re-victimization from Church lawyers and review panels set up to evaluate their claims. Survivors often reported that they were met with stonewalling and obfuscation from the Church when they tried to learn more about their perpetrators.
“I don’t care if I get a dollar or a million dollars. I just want to make sure this never happens again,” said Troy Gray, Director of the Colorado chapter of SNAP, the Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests.
Part of Gray’s strategy to unlock the secrets kept by the Church is to sue for damages; Gray and many others are seeking compensation by bringing civil lawsuits against dioceses around the country, resulting in billions of dollars in claims. In California and Connecticut, state laws were amended to extend the length of time after an abuse in which a victim can seek monetary compensation. Extending these statute of limitations enables a victim to sue for past abuse, some dating back to as far as the 1930s. Currently, 10 states are in various phases of implementing similar plans. The latest, and most vitriol, is Colorado where the state legislature is considering three such bills.
The Church in Colorado has come out in force against extending the statute of limitations. In an interview with Our Sunday Visitor, Denver’s Archbishop Chaput said, “They claim it's about justice, but it’s very hard to see why it would be ‘just’ for innocent Catholic families today to have their community crippled because of the actions of evil or sick individuals 25 to 60 years ago.”
THE LEGISLATION
Essentially, the bills before the Colorado legislature center on two debates: public entities vs. private entities and criminal charges vs. civil charges.
The Colorado Catholic Conference, the lobbying arm of Colorado’s three dioceses, contends that if the statute of limitations are going to be extended it should include both public and private entities so that public schools will be subject to the same laws and punishments as Catholic schools.
The Church also disagrees that civil lawsuits—those that award victims with high dollar pay-outs—should be granted an extension to the statute of limitations. Bishops in Colorado, however, do agree that criminal charges—which punish abusers with jail time—should be granted an extension so that survivors can reclaim justice even if the crime occurred many years ago.
Currently, the statute of limitations in Colorado states that childhood victims of sexual abuse have until they are 28 to file criminal charges. In order to sue an abuser for emotional or medical damages—a civil suit—charges must be brought before the survivor turns 24.
Of the three bills moving through Colorado’s legislature that extend the statue of limitations, only House Bill 1088 has won the support of the Colorado bishops because it applies equally to both public and private institutions and only allows unlimited statue of limitations in criminal cases.
“Getting abusers off the streets through the criminal process is perfectly fine,” says Tim Dore executive Director of the Colorado Catholic Conference. While Dore will not go so far as to call HB 1088 perfect, he says “there are good public policy reasons to have the unlimited statute of limitations in criminal cases.”
House Bill 1090, however, is “flawed” in Dore’s opinion because it allows lawsuits to be brought against dead abusers and their employers. Dore calls this problematic because once the accused has died, the ability to provide a reasonable defense is diminished. Dore also says that HB 1090 does not include counseling as a reasonable step an organization might take to correct a priest’s abusive behavior. Dore says that counseling is sometimes a reasonable reaction if, for example, a priest is found to be participating in “minor sexual abuse.”
“Let the juries decide what were reasonable steps,” Dore says.
Critics, however, think that the Church’s real opposition to HB 1090 is that it removes the statute of limitation for civil cases, potentially costing the Church millions of dollars—unlike HB 1088 which only allows for criminal cases and applies only to the perpetrators themselves. Tom Doyle, a Washington DC-based Dominican priest and an expert in canon law, testified before the Colorado legislature and shook his head.
"I believe that it is blasphemous to put the financial security of my church or any church above the moral or spiritual well-being of the most vulnerable members of that organization,"
Doyle, also a longtime SNAP supporter, appeared before the Senate State Affairs Committee that was hearing testimony regarding Senate Bill 143, a bill that has drawn the lion’s share of Colorado’s media attention and most of the Church’s ire.
SB 143 creates a single two-year window in which plaintiffs can bring civil claims of sexual abuse involving a child, no matter how old the case is. The alleged perpetrator may be dead or incapacitated, and institutions who oversaw the perpetrator can also be sued. The bill applies only to private organizations and not public organizations because state sovereign immunity laws protect government agencies from being held liable for more than $150,000 per claim.
The degree of attention given to Senate Bill 143 is a result of two related issues. First, the rhetoric surrounding the bill has been either anti-Catholic in sentiment, or at least perceived as anti-Catholic by stakeholders like Archbishop Chaput:
"There’s a new and peculiar kind of anti-Catholicism at work in many of these situations. Some of the worst anti-Catholics are angry, disaffected Catholics. Others are people who don’t like the Church for her witness on abortion or contraception or immigration or the death penalty; the list of grievances is endless. Sexual abuse can become a convenient cover for a lot of unrelated hostility."
This sense of antipathy felt by Colorado Catholics is both due to and further enflamed by the second factor to the overheated debate over SB 143: the collision between the Church and the survivor-advocate alliance, each of which has large, well-organized and well-orchestrated campaigns against each other.
OPPOSING VIEWS
The Colorado Catholic Conference has made its chief defense the issue of equity, saying that private organizations should not be punished by SB 143 while public organizations are exempt.
Dore says that “if you’re going to try and address the issue of child abuse you need to address it as a societal problem and not single out one entity over another.”
Dore points to a study sponsored by the US Department of Education which estimates that 6.7 percent of public school students are subjected to physical sexual misconduct. By those estimates, Dore says, 56,000 public school students are being abused, far more than even the most egregious estimate of victims abused by clergy. He contends that if lawmakers were truly interested in protecting children they should start by creating laws that punish public schools with the same civil penalties as non-profits and religious institutions.
Martin Nessbaum, a lawyer for the Colorado Catholic Conference, underscored Dore’s point by distributing a list of 85 instances of sexual misconduct by Colorado public school employees. He says that it was meant as a “small snapshot to show there are teachers who did this, that sexual abuse is prevalent in our society and we have to be vigilant about stopping it.”
Nessbaum, however, was slow to admit that of the 85 employees 58 were removed from their job and 47 faced criminal charges and were found guilty. The same cannot be said of the Catholic Church.
Moreover, advocates for SB 143 maintain that the Church’s pattern of hiding the truth about abusive priests could not happen in public schools because they are subject to public scrutiny and can be sued under the Federal Civil Rights Act—though doing so is difficult and not profitable enough for trial lawyers to peruse especially for older cases.
All three bills under consideration in Colorado at one point contained sovereign immunity language that exempted public institutions from any extension to the statute of limitations. After a series of amendments both House Bills 1088 and 1090 were changed to reflect consensus among state lawmakers that child sexual abuse should cast a wider net than just private institutions. SB 143, however, because of its far reaching implications, cannot so easily include an open window for lawsuits against the state. The logic of sovereign immunity holds that taxpayer-supported entities need protection from harsh penalties associated with lawsuits.
For victims like Troy Gray, issues over sovereign immunity sidestep the real concern of preventing future abuses. The power of SB 143, he says, is that it forces the Church to release information about abusers.
“It’s about protecting children. It’s about warning communities about serial molester out there—communities are unaware of these guys. My perpetrator worked in a Toys R’ Us. They just let him go and he went right back to working with kids without telling anybody.”
Gray—who gave testimony on behalf of victims in Tucson, is a plaintiff in an ongoing lawsuit in California, and now organizes Colorado’s SNAP chapter—says survivors often seek information about their own perpetrators in order to reach closure and to ensure that the abuse cannot occur again.
“Victims want to know, ‘Did my perpetrator do this to anyone else?’ And they can’t get answers.”
Gray says the success in extending the statute of limitations in California was that the Church was forced to release the names of abusive priests so “advocates could go and inform neighborhoods and communities that they have a predator living in their midst.”
David Clohessy, SNAP’s national director, echoes Gray and adds that offering a window for victims to sue removes a chief roadblock the Church often uses against survivors. “Under our current system,” says Clohessy, “child molesters and their employers have an incentive to destroy evidence and intimate witnesses and eventually run out the clock on these horrific crimes.”
Clohessy sees extending the statute of limitations as forcing Church decision-makers to work harder and be more proactive in preventing future abuse. “It’s not unlike a speeding tickets. If no one gets a speeding ticket you don’t have a great incentive to drive carefully. But if people driving down the highway even see a police car they slow down because they don’t want to endure the financial penalties of a ticket or endure increased insurance rates.”
PROGNOSIS
Neither SNAP nor the dioceses in Colorado can make any predictions on what will happen if these bills become law—or even if they have enough votes to pass (in their current form House Bills 1088 and 1090 have the best chance of moving from Colorado’s lower chamber to the Senate; SB 143, however, does not appear to have enough votes to move on).
In 2003 when California passed its one-year elimination of statute of limitations more than 800 claims were filed resulting in almost a billion dollars in settlements and lawsuits. So far, no Californian dioceses have declared bankruptcy despite often threatening so. However, three dioceses—Spokane, Tucson, and Portland—have declared bankruptcy as a result of settlements paid to survivors and their attorneys.
Gray scoffs at notions of a Church permanently harmed from lawsuits even with the knowledge of dioceses selling land and closing parishes in order to pay for settlements and increased liability insurance. He glosses any negative effects as scare tactics thrown from the pulpit.
“When you think about it, this is actually good for the Church. These aren’t chapter 13 bankruptcies. These are chapter 11. Reorganization. This is the government coming in and helping the Church pay its bills.”
All told, 10 states are seriously considering legislation this year that would extend the statute of limitations for sexual abuse against children: Maryland, Ohio, New York, Michigan, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Massachusetts. In most cases SNAP’s success has been limited or only just begun. For example, Maryland and New York have recently introduced bills that have so far failed to win broad support with the media or lawmakers. In other states (New Jersey and Pennsylvania) the effort is considered all but stalled and will not likely be taken up again this year.
Clohessy admits that SNAP’s struggle is an uphill battle and that their main focus is currently in Colorado and Ohio where they seem to have had the most success. This success, though, has not gone unnoticed by Catholics who are ardent in fighting where California and Connecticut did not. Archbishop Chaput told Our Sunday Visitor that it was fear and guilt that kept other bishops from taking a more rigorous stand. But, for Chaput, that sentiment has changed:
"As a bishop, that means I have an obligation—a serious duty I can’t avoid—both to help the victims, and to defend innocent Catholics today from being victimized because of earlier sins in which they played no part."
Posted by 1000monkeys on April 1, 2006 05:07 AM