State Rep. Lisa Bennington of Pennsylvania has proposed a significant change to Pennsylvania’s statutes of limitation in civil sexual abuse cases (House Bill 1137). The bill would change from 30 years to 50 years the statute of limitations, placing it in line with the criminal statute. It would also suspend the statute of limitations in civil cases for two years. Rep. Bennington says that this is not about the Catholic Church; that any public or private institution would be subject to the same rules.
I object to this change.
First of all, immunity would certainly be applied to protect school districts and public health in Pennsylvania from the consequences.
Secondly, to suggest that this change is not about the Catholic Church is preposterous. Were it about anything else, it would not include a suspension of the statute of limitations for two years.
More significantly though, such a change suggests a profound ignorance of the law, of our society, and of the consequences of such a change.
There are undoubtedly false claims to sex abuse by Catholic religious. There are also a meaningful number of claims for which the evidence of such abuse is impossible to find or reconcile. It is to address this specific problem that statutes of limitations were created.
Statutes of limitations exist for the specific purpose of preventing injustice.
It is unjust to admit into evidence on a new claim, that which is so aged or unverifiable that the defendant cannot reasonably address it. Where, as here, the claimant has let significant time pass and the alleged perpetrator is aged or infirm, it is fundamentally unjust to take the word of the claimed victim as proof.
One answer to this proposition is that such things should be worked out in court and that “their day in court” is all that victims of abuse want. However, such a rebuttal does not take into account the state of our society.
We have a culture consumed with unearned entitlements. Fraud is rampant and the litigiousness of our society has reached a point of embarrassment. If the Legislature does as Rep. Bennington asks, the number of claims against institutions that serve children would be overwhelming. Many of these “new” claims would be of the worst sort: frivolous, speculative, or fraudulent. To defend their organizations, the institutions would have a responsibility to settle as any of these claims as possible and, in settling them, many undeserving would get payouts at our expense.
More importantly, the injustice of such claims against the aged and infirm who are in the worst of all possible places to defend themselves should give us serious pause.
Imagine:
How would YOU defend yourself against a sex abuse claim?
You are in your late sixties.
A man in his thirties alleges that you molested him when he was a boy. You know you did no such thing, but, in your deposition, you cannot say where you were thirty years ago.
Oh, the claimant asserts a vivid memory of the events of that day and has read enough to know the signs of trauma necessary to establish a prima facie claim, but you have no verifiable memory to rebut that claim.
Your life and work are turned upside down.
Word gets out that you are an abuser and you are placed on a "leave of absence." Your superiors believe you but have practical problems to address and you are forced to resign. Your employer settles the case for $25,000, with no admission of fault.
Unlikely scenario? Not at all.
This is EXACTLY where this bill leads.
Which brings me to my final point:
It doesn’t matter whether anything actually happened. It is not enough to have good adult supervision. Institutions will have to mitigate the potential liability some thirty or even fifty years in the future by documenting things now. In this environment, programs in which children sleep over or spend time with only a single adult represent overwhelming liability.
Frankly, I cannot fathom why adults would volunteer for youth programs since the potential for complete destruction of reputation and position in life has been ratcheted up considerably by attempts to destroy the statute of limitations.
A thousand years of experience in law led us to construct Statutes of Limitations. We should not easily set them aside.
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2 comments:
GV's statute-of-limitations post raises the issue of unforeseen consequences, such as scammers and blackmailers taking advantage of faded memories and lost/destroyed records.
Come to think of it, if GV mentioned the likelihood of scams, then I guess they are not an unforeseen consequence at all. Scams and blackmails and the great distress and dissatisfaction of all parties involved are foreseen consequences!
What I foresee [Not to be confused with 4C, which is the undesirable walk-up apartment located under the one leased by that overly earnest fellow who “rescues” abandoned and abused Shetland ponies and brings them home until they become acclimated to city life and stop bucking and stampeding around at the slightest provocation, such as the sound of the downstairs neighbor breathing. Nor is “foresee” to be confused with C4, which is an explosive compound that is wicked powerful and can easily blow open safes that homeowners have carelessly left lying around where anyone just innocently wandering in to their houses can find in closets, under beds, and behind overpriced paintings by no-talent "modernist" painters. And “foresee” is definitely not to be confused with "Apartment 3-G", which is one of those soap opera comic strips that chronicles the lives of "three unmarried career women"...who..."become more than friends and closer than sisters," and which sounds like yet another piece of invidious agitprop by the polyandrous same-sex marriage movement.)]
...Um, now that I have established what I am not talking about, can anybody remind me what I was talking about? What's that? Oh, right, Buddy. I was talking about foreseeable consequences of the effective repeal of the civil statute of limitations in Pennsylvania's child abuse cases. (Buddy? He's just the little voice in my head like everyone has. He's the nagging little voice that tells you pay your fair share of the bar tab, to yield the right of way to the little old lady who is clearly terrified to find herself navigating the high speed lanes of I-95 with her walker, to climb that water tower with your 30.06 equipped with a low-light scope and loaded with teflon® coated so-called "cop killer" bullets and....well, you know. Just the sorts of things all our little voices tell us to do. :-)
Anyway, back to foreseeable consequences: Every school and every daycare facility will be festooned with a plethora of audio-visual recording devices like popcorn strung on an 19th century Christmas tree, only connected back to a remote digital recording device by a WiFi terabit Ethernet link instead of to each other by string, oh, and not nearly so tasty!
But it will not be enough to pervasively surveil child care facilities. Teachers and care providers will be under tremendous pressure to report even the merest suspicion of abuse. To hesitate and allow the potential abuse to surface later would raise the specter of life-shattering law suits and charges being filed up to 75 years later, when the recordings would be viewed through the damning filter of hindsight.
Faced with a drumbeat of accusations and investigations, parents will increasingly feel the pressure to install surveillance devices throughout the home. Trendy baby showers will feature "Babies-R-Us" gift certificates toward the purchase and installation of comprehensive surveillance systems. "Baby-proofing" a house will come to mean wiring it for sight and sound more thoroughly than the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
With crèches, schools, and homes all subject to 24/7 surveillance, it will only be a matter time before any place a child could end up will be surveilled. In other words, every place will be surveilled, and just about everyone will at least have access to every second of recordings of themselves, and probably to recordings of anybody! An exhibitionist's dream. A voyeur's paradise.
Nanny-Cam gone plumb wild.
Do you understand what this invidious and ubiquitous surveilance and recording of every second of our lives will mean? Do you? No, no, no. I'm not talking about the loss of an already mostly illusory privacy. I'm talking about vital, real-life issues. Do you not see that for the first time in the history of the human race, that with a click of the mouse and a spin of the scroll wheel we will be able to access surveillance recordings from weeks, months, and even years in the past? Do you not see that that the nanny-cam society will artificially extend individual memory in the same way as the invention of writing artificially extended individual learning? Do you not see that human society will be as profoundly changed by this development as by the advent of agriculture? For, finally, a man will be able to win an argument with his wife.
Undoubtably one of the most ORIGINAL posts I have ever read!!!
Thanks for the laughter.
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