NEW YORK
New York Daily News
Editorial
New York has some of the toughest-sounding sex crime laws in America — yet the Legislature has stitched the statutes with technicalities that protect both those who victimize children and institutions like schools and churches that have served as enablers.
The hidden and grotesque nature of the laws has come into focus in the two months since the Daily News discovered that an exceedingly tight statute of limitations barred prosecutors from charging an alleged serial abuser with victimizing numerous foster children.
Almost daily since then, The News has spotlighted how the Legislature’s strictures have denied criminal and civil justice to people whose lives were irrevocably scarred in childhood by trusted adults who proved to be sexual predators.
To their great shame, Democratic Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Republican state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan closed their doors — symbolically and literally — to men and women who sought to tell their stories of stolen innocence in hope of spurring reform in the closing days of the 2016 legislative session.
Horrific in detail, with many thoroughly documented, those tales leave no doubt New York has been complicit in injustice on a scale that can be tolerated only by lawmakers who are in denial or who have surrendered their consciences to lobbyists for institutions that would be threatened with compensation claims.
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.