Brown Oks Longer Time for Child Abuse Prosecutions — but Not for Damage Suits

By Bob Egelko
SF Gate
October 1, 2014

http://blog.sfgate.com/crime/2014/10/01/brown-oks-longer-time-for-child-abuse-prosecutions-but-not-for-damage-suits/

The law treats child abuse differently than most other crimes, because of the age of the victims and their natural inclination to put their nightmares behind them. So the legal deadline, or statute of limitations, for filing criminal charges of child abuse is the victim’s 28th birthday, or even later if the victim hasn’t yet realized that the cause of his or her current emotional trauma was a long-forgotten sexual assault.

When state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, sponsored legislation this year to lengthen the statute of limitations until the victim turns 40, he cited the same rationale — that traumatized victims often suppress painful memories, sometimes with their therapists’ encouragement — and the bill, SB926, sailed through both houses without an opposing vote. On Tuesday, Gov. Jerry Brown signed it into law, effective next year.

Beall carried another bill, SB924, to extend the filing deadline for civil damage suits over child abuse from the victim’s 26th birthday to age 40. It passed both houses, with some dissent, and reached the governor’s desk. On Tuesday, Brown vetoed it.

“Statutes of limitations exist as a matter of fundamental fairness,” Brown wrote in his veto message. “As I wrote last year (when he vetoed another Beall measure on child abuse lawsuits), there comes a time when an individual or organization should be secure in the reasonable expectation that past acts are indeed in the past and not subject to further lawsuits. With the passage of time, evidence may be lost or disposed of, memories fade and witnesses move away or die.”

But don’t those arguments apply equally to criminal prosecutions, which can send someone away to prison for decades? Do evidence, memories or witnesses endure longer in criminal cases? Why should the state have a more demanding standard for civil suits, when all that is at stake is money?

Brown didn’t say. But one of his phrases — “an individual or organization” — offered a clue.

Civil damage suits in abuse cases can be filed against individual perpetrators, but they’re usually more likely to bear fruit against the organization that employed the abuser, brought him or her in contact with the victim, and allegedly should have known of the likelihood of abuse. Organizations like child care centers, or public schools. Or the Catholic Church.

The California School Boards Association and the California Catholic Conference were among the opponents of SB924. According to a Senate staff report, the Catholic Conference argued that the bill was unfair because it wouldn’t have extended the statute of limitations for child abuse suits against the state of California.

If the state has been accused of harboring one or more active child abusers in its institutions, it seems to have escaped public notice until now. If any such cases exist, as the Catholic Conference points out, the victims must file their civil suits quickly to stay in court, although prosecutors will have many more years to file criminal charges. Whether that argument helped to sway Brown is something that only the governor knows.