PENNSYLVANIA
Dumas Law Group
July 1, 2016 By Gilion Dumas
Pennsylvania failed victims of child sexual abuse and caved into pressure from the Catholic Church and insurance companies. Faced with the chance to fully reform the state’s statute of limitations for civil claims, the state Senate balked.
By a 9-4 vote, the Judiciary Committee of the Pennsylvania State Senate passed an amendment stripping the provision that would have made the law apply retroactively. That clause was necessary to allow victims abused in decades past to file lawsuits. The Pennsylvania House had earlier passed its version of the bill containing just such a retroactivity provision.
Some opponents of retroactivity said they believed it was unconstitutional. This is a weak excuse. Courts consistently uphold these retroactivity clauses in civil statutes of limitations, as the courts have done in California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, and Massachusetts.
The Judiciary Committee’s vote is a shame. The well-publicized findings of two Philadelphia grand jury reports and the recent Altoona-Johnstown report on the rampant sex abuse of Catholic children in Pennsylvania should have moved Committee members to vote in favor of the bill with its retroactivity provision intact. Victim advocates, the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association, and several high-profile prosecutors have supported retroactivity since the first of several grand jury reports exposing decades of clergy abuse within Catholic dioceses in Pennsylvania.
Note: This is an Abuse Tracker excerpt. Click the title to view the full text of the original article. If the original article is no longer available, see our News Archive.