(TX)
Dallas Morning News [Dallas TX]
November 12, 2026
By Kevin Krause
Old statutes of limitation are a major hurdle for authorities seeking to prosecute Catholic priests accused of decades-old abuse of children.
Prosecuting child abusers is considerably easier in Texas than it used to be.
That’s good news for victims today. Not for survivors of clergy abuse from the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s when the Catholic Church was accused of routinely covering up the sex crimes of priests. In those cases, too much time has passed to bring charges.
Texas lawmakers in 2007 eliminated the state’s statute of limitations for the crime of child sexual assault, under its version of the 2005 Jessica Lunsford Act. The law is named for a girl who was abducted, raped and murdered in Florida two years earlier by a convicted sex offender.
That change and others opened the door for more victims to bring lawsuits and press charges against their abusers.
Some victims. Not all.
Due to constitutional constraints, the change in Texas law only applies to criminal cases filed after September 2007 when the law took effect. For those who suffered abuse before 2007, most no longer have any criminal or civil recourse.
They are covered under the statute of limitations at that time.
Bobbi Reilly Sheahan, a Dallas lawyer, said the establishment of legal deadlines to bring criminal cases was rooted in the balancing of rights.
“It’s designed to balance the priorities of allowing victims the chance to pursue justice,” she said, “and protecting accused people from indefinitely having the ability to be prosecuted.”
Evidence can be lost, memories can fade, and witnesses can die or disappear over time, she said, potentially making it difficult to both prosecute a case and to mount a defense.
That balance, however, has increasingly tipped in favor of victims, “in recognition of the challenges that they face in reporting and seeking prosecution,” said Sheahan, who wrote an article about statutes of limitation last year for the FBI’s bulletin that goes out to law enforcement.
The statute of limitations for sexual assault and aggravated assault of a child in Texas was initially three years after the crime was committed, she said. The Legislature expanded it to five years in 1983; to 10 years in 1987; and then in 1997 to 10 years from the victim’s 18th birthday, Sheahan said. And then 2007 saw the elimination of any legal limit.
There are exceptions that allow prosecutors to charge people for very old crimes, Sheahan said. If a suspect leaves Texas, for example, the clock on that legal deadline can pause until they return to the state. That provision was included to prevent criminals from simply moving out of state and waiting for the clock to run out.
Also, incriminating DNA evidence that is recovered and tested can nullify any expired deadline to bring some categories of charges, including sexual assault of a child, she added.
Legal deadlines can also affect civil cases.
At least three people who said they were abused as children decades ago by former priest Richard Brown sued the Dallas Diocese beginning in 2020. The diocese argued the suits should be thrown out because of the statute of limitations.
The victims’ attorneys wrote in court filings that the trauma of childhood sexual abuse led to repressed memories and mental impairment that made their clients unable to fully understand what had been done to them until much later in life. And as a result, they did not have the mental capacity to pursue a lawsuit sooner, they argued.
The three lawsuits settled for undisclosed sums before the judges could rule on whether the statute of limitations applied.
The Dallas Diocese did not respond to emails or phone calls seeking comment.
One of the lawsuits accused Brown of molesting an eighth-grade student in a required baptism class he taught after school at St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church in Plano in the early 1990s.
Another involved a woman who alleged Brown repeatedly molested her in the 1980s when she was 8 and he was assigned as an assistant pastor at Holy Family of Nazareth in Irving.
Sheahan said the statute of limitations to sue for such a claim in Texas civil courts used to be five years. In 2015, the Legislature extended it to 15 years for a child victim, she said. The current legal deadline for bringing a lawsuit, established in 2019, is 30 years from the time the victim turns 18, or when they reach the age of 48.
Unlike some other states, Texas does not have a “lookback window” for survivors to sue for sex abuse that occurred when they were children. They are brief windows of time — usually two or three years — in which any expired cases can be temporarily revived, allowing victims to bring suit for abuse regardless of when it occurred or the statute of limitations at that time.
Advocates say such a two- or three-year revival window is needed, particularly for clergy abuse cases that were long concealed.
Most victims do not come forward to report child sexual abuse until they reach middle age, according to studies.
David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire and a sociology professor there, said some parents may have wanted to shield their children from publicity that could hamper their recovery.
“It may well have been with the agreement of the families and the children that this should not be taken to the authorities,” he said.
Such was the case with Father Edward Graff, a Pennsylvania priest described by police and proesecutors as a prolific sexual abuser who was sent to the Amarillo diocese where they say he continued to molest children. He was arrested in 2002 in Texas on a charge of abusing a boy and died the same year in a Lubbock hospital after breaking his hip in jail while awaiting trial.
The parents of some of the boys told them to stay away from the priest after they learned of the abuse, according to a Texas investigator. None of the parents ever notified law enforcement authorities.
It wasn’t just parents. The church was “very keen to keep it undercover,” said Finkelhor, who served on an advisory board for the Boston Archdiocese during the abuse crisis.
One motivation for not coming forward, Finkelhor said, was the financial repercussions.
The risk, he added, was real. Many dioceses have been bankrupted by big legal judgments.
“For an organization that was supposed to put the care of the oppressed over issues like money,” Finkelhor said, “it was a big moral failing.”
Kevin Krause has worked for The Dallas Morning News since 2003. He covers federal criminal courts and has been a journalist for 30 years. Kevin is a multiple recipient of the Stephen Philbin Award for excellence in legal reporting. Kevin earned a BA from Boston University.