By Susan Nielsen
The Oregonian
March 9, 2011
http://www.oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/susan_nielsen/index.ssf/2011/03/the_goldschmidt_bill_time_limi_1.html
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| Neil Goldschmidt, former governor of Oregon, in a 1990 photo. |
Former Gov. Neil Goldschmidt isn't the only child abuser in Oregon who has reached old age without ever spending a day behind prison bars. This state is full of people who molested children decades ago and never paid for it, even while their victims pay the price every day.
How to fix this injustice? Some state lawmakers and advocates would like to remove the time limits for prosecuting child sex abuse crimes so that perpetrators could be charged at any moment of their lives. Survivors who testified in Salem this week in favor of the change made a highly compelling case. Still, I'm not convinced the benefits, while great, would outweigh the potential costs.
House Bill 3057 would eliminate the statute of limitations for crimes against minors. One of the bill's supporters, Rep. Dave Hunt, D-Gladstone, says the legislation was drafted too broadly and will be narrowed to cover a short list of serious abuses. He says it's only fair for victims in these cases to get a lifetime to come forward, since the effects of childhood sexual and physical abuse are lifelong.
The public testimony underscored his point. Several abuse survivors in their 40s and 50s told lawmakers about harm they'd suffered as children. The pain sounded fresh, despite the passage of decades.
For example, a 41-year-old woman from Southwest Portland said three male relatives abused her between the ages of six and 13. She told her mother, who didn't believe her. The abuse continued.
"I tried to pretend it never happened," she said, voice trembling. She'd see the male relatives at family functions while growing up and have to talk to them. "I kept living my life within the walls I built to protect myself. And those walls were walls of shame, fear, embarrassment, despair, and a lot of pretending that I was OK, when I really wasn't OK."
She said it took until her late 30s to confront what happened. By then, the statute of limitations for criminal prosecution had long since run out. Though HB 3057 wouldn't apply to expired cases like hers, she asked the Legislature to change the law to help other victims.
Other survivors made similar points. A man from Eugene said it took him 35 years to tell the story of being abused by a youth pastor as a 13-year-old. Another man said you never recover from the trauma; you just learn to cope with it. Kelly Clark, a high-profile attorney who has represented many sex abuse victims in Oregon, explained to lawmakers why survivors often take so long to tell anyone.
"I compare it to the perpetrator putting a pill in the child's mouth that causes them to go to sleep," Clark said.
That sleepwalk can last for years.
So the appeal of erasing the time limits for prosecuting child abuse is obvious. It seems profoundly unfair that any uncle, any priest, any stepdad, any former governor, could slip beyond the law's grasp. And as one victim explained, the time limit seems to imply that a victim should be "over it" by then.
Yet criminal justice isn't just about nabbing known offenders. It's also about ensuring fair trials for all accused people, including those facing false or inflated charges. The purpose of a statute of limitations is to prosecute a case before memories fade, evidence is lost, or witnesses die or move away. This is especially important in Oregon, which doesn't require unanimous juries for criminal convictions.
"It is a due process issue," says legislative director Andrea Meyer of the American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon. "It is the reason we have a statute of limitations, which is to provide the necessary safeguards -- not to protect the guilty, but to protect the innocent."
In recent years, Oregon has extended the time limits for prosecuting sex crimes. The time limit for prosecuting rape is typically six years, and considerably longer for crimes involving children: Those crimes can be prosecuted until the victim turns 30, or within 12 years of an official report. Also, in 2009, Oregon removed the time limit for prosecuting certain sex crimes if the suspect is connected to the crime via DNA. A first-degree rape with DNA evidence can be prosecuted forever, much like a murder.
These time limits seem fair. Keeping the prosecutor's window open for extra years for child sex abuse is important, since a central cruelty of the crime is manipulating a young victim into silence. Closing the window eventually is appropriate, too, especially for cases that rely on individual testimony more than hard evidence.
If Oregon decided to keep the window open forever, it would face some tradeoffs. On the plus side, we might put a few more old creeps in prison. On the minus side, we might discover the typical aging creep becoming less likely to admit wrongdoing in civil suits (or to make amends with family members) when they have the threat of prison time hanging over their heads. Those uncles and priests and stepdads would be stonewalling, denying and character-assassinating like crazy, rather than sometimes acknowledging the harm done.
As for Goldschmidt, he eventually admitted serious wrongdoing for sexually abusing a teenager during the 1970s while serving as Portland mayor. It's not at all clear he would have admitted as much if prison had been an option. More denial would have hurt the victim further and kept the public in the dark, and where's the justice in that?
Oregon should keep most of its focus on the front end -- raising public awareness about child sex abuse, investigating allegations thoroughly, prosecuting cases effectively and helping young survivors recover. If lawmakers can prove that erasing the time limits for abuse would improve the criminal justice system, they could proceed. But they should prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
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