HARRISBURG (PA)
PennLive.com
March 29, 2023
By Zack Hoopes
The Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Wednesday on bills that would allow for constitutional amendments opening a statute of limitations window for child sex abuse claims – one step in what is likely to result in a partisan impasse between the House and state Senate.
“There’s no more single effective measure to protect today’s society than to allow window legislation,” Mike McDonnell, an abuse survivor who is now the communications director for the Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, told the committee Wednesday.
The possibility of justice will embolden more survivors to come forward, advocates told the committee, and “they need a good law in place to be able to hold their abusers accountable and name them publicly,” McDonnell said.
Wednesday’s hearing was advertised as addressing both House Bill 1 and Senate Bill 1, both of which would, if passed, place a constitutional amendment before voters on the next eligible ballot.
That referendum would allow voters to enact a two-year window to bring civil suits involving childhood sexual abuse that would otherwise be outside the normal statue of limitations, a measure driven in part by the abuse scandal in the Catholic church that has unfolded over the last two decades.
Both bills were re-committed to the Judiciary committee for the purpose of the hearing, which is required to be held under the new procedural rules passed by House Democrats earlier this year. Judiciary Chairman Tim Briggs, D-Montgomery, said Wednesday he is awaiting a determination from the House Parliamentarian as to whether the committee will need to vote at its next meeting to return the bills to the full House for final passage.
Despite having been introduced in Harrisburg repeatedly for years, window legislation for child sex abuse has previously been stymied, either by political brinksmanship or, in 2020, a publication error by the Pennsylvania Department of State.
Politically, what is not in the current bills is also crucial. SB1 was originally passed by the Republican majority in the Senate with two further constitutional amendment referenda – one that would give the legislature power to kill regulations without the governor’s approval and another that would enact stricter voter identification requirements.
Democrats voiced concerns that the provisions would open the door to Republicans killing environmental policies and enacting restrictive voting laws; further, the new House rules set requires sole-subject bills for constitutional amendments.
The House Judiciary’s Democratic majority promptly voted to strip the two Republican-favored provisions out of SB1 during a meeting March 1, leaving the bill identical to HB1, the statute of limitations bill introduced in the House by Rep. Mark Rozzi, D-Berks.
Rozzi, the former Pa. House Speaker, has been open about his own childhood abuse by a Catholic priest.
Republicans during the March 1 meeting predicted the move to gut the other two measures from SB1 would leave the matter dead on arrival when it returned to their Senate colleagues.
The House previously sent identical language to that contained in HB1 and SB1 to the Senate during the special session on sexual abuse limitations in February, but the Senate has not acted on those bills. Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman, R-Indiana, said last month the Senate “has fulfilled and completed our commitment to address the issue of statute of limitations for child sex abuse victims” by passing the multi-amendment bill in January.
The arcane political wrangling has not been kind to victims, who are “told to stand around and wait while the debates occur over the unrelated constitutional amendments,” Marci Hamilton, founder of the child protection advocacy group Child USA, told the Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
Some Republicans also have voiced objections to the window legislation on its face. Rep. Paul Schemel, R-Franklin – the ranking Republican on the Judiciary Committee in the absence of Minority Chair Rob Kauffman, R-Franklin – acknowledged Wednesday that “I’ve been a vocal opponent” of the statute of limitations window.
While this “might seem a very repugnant position to take” for some, Schemel said, the purpose of a statute of limitations is “to protect justice on the part of the defendant” by ensuring cases are brought in a timely manner while proper evidence is still available.
Schemel also voiced concerns that civil suits would not necessarily cause instances of abuse to be brought to light, and “what actually happens in most cases is these cases are aggregated into large class-action suits that are settled out of court with very little admission on the part of the defendant.”
Wednesday’s hearing panelists broadly rejected those arguments, given that coming forward about childhood sexual abuse is “different than disclosing victimhood in any other crime,” said Katie Shipp, managing partner for Marsh Law Firm, which works exclusively on sexual abuse cases.
The power imbalance involved, and the age of the victim, means that most are not able to come to terms and fully process what happened until decades later. The average age of disclose is 50, Shipp said, making the existing statute of limitations an “arbitrary legal timeline” that does not comport with the unique nature of the crime.
Further, the opportunity to make a claim in court provides an outlet for victims to address their abusers without fear of a defamation suit, Hamilton said.
“I can tell you what happens to the victim who comes forward – they get sued for defamation,” Hamilton said, with perpetrators aiming to swamp their accusers in legal fees, even if the allegations are true.
“If the other side can use the defamation laws against you, it basically shuts you back up,” Hamilton said. “What the windows do is create a safe space to tell your story.”
A 2018 grand jury report by then-Attorney General Josh Shapiro detailed over 1,000 cases of abuse by 300 Catholic priests in Pennsylvania, with the church often moving priests in order to conceal the problem; a 2004 investigation of the Catholic church by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, commissioned by Catholic clergy, estimated that 4% of priests active between 1950 and 2002 nationwide engaged in abuse.
McDonnell cited certain Catholic dioceses where the prevalence was 10% or more, as well as his own experience in Philadelphia where he said the acts of known pedophiles were labeled “ministerial misconduct” by the church’s internal investigations. One of the men McDonnell said abused him, Francis Trauger, was convicted of acts falling within the criminal statute of limitations and sentenced to prison time.
Even though some victims have obtained closure under current law, a limitations window “will do exactly what its designed to do – to expose the predator, to allow the victim some level of justice, and more importantly have their story validated,” McDonnell said.
Further, Hamilton noted, the limitations window would not just apply to victims of Catholic priests – other states that have enacted such windows have seen large claims against others, particularly doctors who were serial abusers of patients.
Only one speaker at Wednesday’s hearing provided information that would support opposition to the limitations window – Charles Greenawalt of the Susquehanna Valley Center for Public Policy, a conservative think tank that published a paper asserting the window “would probably result in a large number of claims being filed against Pennsylvania school districts” for abuse by teachers.
The paper by Greenawalt’s organization argues that the window could result in thousands of claims worth billions of dollars against school districts, numbers that Child USA described as an “egregious misuse” of data and which Marc Stier of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center, a liberal-leaning think tank, said Wednesday were “implausibly high.”
Stier noted one of the core estimates in the Susquehanna paper appears to assume that the rate of abuse among public school teachers is identical to the rate of abuse among Catholic priests – despite priests being entirely male and teachers being three-quarters female, with women statistically less likely to be sex offenders.
Asked about the methodology on Wednesday, Greenawalt stated he was not the actual author of the paper and would need to get back to the committee. Greenawalt was invited to testify by Republican membership, Briggs said.
In addition to the bills for which the hearing was held Wednesday, the House also has passed House Bill 2, which would create a two-year window for childhood sexual abuse victims by simple statute; some critics have objected that this is unconstitutional, hence the bills to create amendment referenda as well.
“The goal is to send [the Senate] multiple options” in hopes that Republican leadership bites on one, Briggs said Wednesday.