CALIFORNIA
Mercury News
By Tracey Kaplan
tkaplan@mercurynews.com
By the time Will Lynch was ready in the mid-1990s to report he’d been sexually abused as a child by a priest on a camping trip, there was nothing police could do about it. The abuse had happened about two decades earlier when he was 7, and the legal window then for bringing charges against the priest had closed by the time he reached 13.
Lynch and his brother sued and won a sizeable legal settlement from the diocese in 1998. And Lynch was able to expose his alleged assailant and draw statewide attention to the fact that child molesters can evade prosecution after he punched the priest in Los Gatos and was tried and acquitted three years ago by a sympathetic Santa Clara County jury. But it still grates on Lynch that a legal technicality allowed the priest to escape criminal prosecution.
Now, Lynch is working to change that. He’s been cleared by the secretary of state’s office to gather signatures for a ballot measure that would wipe out California’s criminal and civil statutes of limitations for sex crimes against children, a move already adopted by New York, Texas and Florida in criminal cases.
The initiative written by the 48-year-old San Francisco man would wipe out the legal deadline barring prosecutors from filing criminal charges against child molesters and victims from suing them after a certain period of time. It would apply only to children molested after its adoption, not to Lynch and others like him.
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