UNITED STATES
WBEZ
Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was sentenced to over a year in prison for bank fraud, but he can’t be prosecuted for abusing four teen boys decades ago. That’s because the statute of limitations for those charges lapsed long ago.
Morning Shift dove into the subject of limitations, particularly around crimes involving sexual abuse of children.
Why do we have statutes of limitations?
The point of statutes of limitations is to give both sides of a case a fair chance at gathering evidence to present their case.
“There’s a concern, I think among law enforcement and prosecutors that you wait for a very long time and these crimes are very hard to prove,” said Illinois’ Attorney General Lisa Madigan, who is mounting an effort to abolish the statute of limitations for certain crimes against children.
As of January 2014, Illinois law gives victims of sexual abuse as a child until their 18th birthday, plus 20 years to report the crime, a time period that basically comes out of legislative wrangling.
“The goal is to balance the interests of the defendant against the interests of the alleged victims, and the 20 years represents some attempt to strike that balance appropriately,” explained Hugh Mundy, Assistant Professor at the John Marshall Law School.
Mundy added that when a crime is prosecuted many years after it happened, the conviction may offer the victim a sense of justice, but fails to achieve other goals of prosecution, like the protection of the public and rehabilitation of the perpetrator.
What problems do statutes of limitations cause?
There’s often a delay between when the crime is committed and when it’s reported, particularly around sex crimes against children, said Meg O’Rourke of the Chicago Children’s Advocacy Center.
The perpetrator is generally someone the child knows and trusts and that “makes it really hard for the child to come forward,” she said.
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