PHILADELPHIA (PA)
The Legal Intelligencer
November 10, 2018
By Christopher Munley
On Aug. 14, the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office released a grand jury report (report) on Catholic clergy sexual abuse after a two-year investigation that revealed that more than 300 priests sexually abused more than 1,000 children over seven decades in six of the state’s eight Roman Catholic dioceses.
The report, which included Allentown, Erie, Greensburg, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh and Scranton (Pennsylvania’s two other dioceses, Philadelphia and Altoona-Johnstown had been the subjects of earlier grand jury reports that found similarly damaging information about clergy and bishops in those dioceses), painted a blistering picture of church officials routinely covering up crimes until the perpetrators were too old to prosecute or litigate.
This report has now reignited a debate about whether to eliminate the statute of limitations for future civil and criminal cases involving child sexual abuse as well as how to address the problem for older victims of past crimes. The issue for these sexual abuse victims is how do they seek justice?
Among other policy recommendations in the report, jurors specifically recommended that the state eliminate the criminal statute of limitations for child sexual abuse and give otherwise time-barred victims a “two-year window” to file civil lawsuits. The grand jury said that “no piece of legislation can predict the point at which a victim of child sexual abuse will find the strength to come forward.”
The grand jurors called for the suspension of the statute of limitations for civil suits to allow victims to seek justice because: “We saw victims; they are marked for life, and many of them wind up addicted, or impaired, or dead. Our proposal would open a limited window, offering them a chance, finally, to be heard in court.”
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