CALIFORNIA
The Press-Enterprise
[Gov. Brown’s statement]
BY JIM MILLER SACRAMENTO BUREAU October 13, 2013
SACRAMENTO — Calling the proposal “unfair and open-ended,” Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed legislation Saturday, Oct. 12, that would have allowed more victims of childhood sexual abuse to pursue lawsuits against the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts and other private groups that had overseen the abuser.
The measure would have created a one-year legal window for people who suffered sexual abuse many years earlier but who have been prevented from pursuing lawsuits under a landmark 2002 law because of a California Supreme Court ruling a decade later.
In a lengthy veto message that cited Roman law and included a detailed history of California’s rules on sex-abuse litigation, Brown complained that the legislation applied only to private institutions, such as the Catholic Church, and not schools and other government entities.
The church has paid out an estimated $1.2 billion since 2002. Lawmakers approved a bill in 2008 clarifying that the 2002 law also applied to government agencies. That change, though, did not allow lawsuits in cases where the statute of limitations had expired, Brown noted in his veto of Senate Bill 131.
“What (SB 131) does do is go back to the only group, i.e. private institutions, that have already been subjected to the unusual ‘one year revival period’ and makes them, and them alone, subject to suit indefinitely,” Brown wrote in his veto message.
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