NEW YORK
New York Daily News
BY KEVIN T. MULHEARN
Assembly Majority Leader Joseph Morelle has expressed his reservations about supporting legislation that would reform the New York statute of limitations for sexual abuse survivors.
While I appreciate Mr. Morelle’s candor in addressing this hot-button issue, as an attorney on the front lines of this issue for more than a decade, I can state with confidence that his opposition is based on misconceptions, half-truths, and false suppositions.
Mr. Morelle raises the holy grail legal issue of due process. But he wrongly assumes that individuals accused of molesting children and institutions accused of facilitating their employees’ sexual assaults of children will be denied due process if the statute of limitations law is reformed. In fact, right now in New York State there are scores of men and women whose childhood innocence was stolen from them who, without a doubt, have already been denied due process, a fair procedure to give them their days in court on claims against those who grievously hurt them, by the existing law as it is written (by the legislators) and interpreted (by the judges).
The best example of this is the Yeshiva University case, where two venerable federal courts took the law into their own hands and — in direct opposition to the arguments made and investigation conducted by Yeshiva University itself — manufactured from thin air a preposterous judicial finding that 34 plaintiffs who sued Yeshiva University in 2013 after learning that the school’s top administrators had engaged in a multi-decade cover-up of sexual abuse at Yeshiva University High School in Manhattan, would have discovered Yeshiva’s own misconduct had they reported their abuse to school administrators before they turned 21.
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