ILLINOIS
Chicago Tribune
At his sentencing hearing a year ago, former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert apologized for sexually abusing boys he’d mentored decades before as a wrestling coach at Yorkville High School. “For 11 months, I have been struggling to come to terms with events that occurred almost four decades ago,” he said at the emotional Chicago hearing in which a federal judge called him a “serial child molester.”
Hastert wasn’t convicted on any sexual abuse charges, however. The statute of limitations had long ago expired. Instead, he was convicted on charges relating to bank fraud. A federal investigation into suspicious bank transactions by the former Illinois legislator and congressman had eventually revealed the sexual abuse. …
Illinois is already a leader in providing victims of sexual abuse a pathway to justice. Several years ago, in reaction to the priest abuse scandal within the Roman Catholic Church, the state removed the statute of limitations on sex abuse crimes against children. But there were crucial exceptions. Victims needed to produce corroborating physical evidence, for instance.
Few cases meet that criteria, leaving most abuse cases subject to a statute of limitations that gives a victim only until he or she is 38 (20 years after he or she turns 18) to file a complaint. The new law would remove those extra requirements and effectively eliminate the statute of limitations for cases in which the current legal time limit hasn’t yet expired.
Here’s why this is important: Ending the statute of limitations would acknowledge that many victims are simply unable to deal with, let alone talk about, the abuse they suffered as children until much later in life.
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