PENNSYLVANIA
York Daily Record
Brandie Kessler, bkessler@ydr.com September 20, 2016
Days after confirming a statewide grand jury investigation into six Catholic dioceses, including Harrisburg, State Rep. Mark Rozzi stood with survivors of clergy sex abuse in Philadelphia to issue a call to action.
Rozzi and others spoke in support of statute of limitations reform that includes a retroactive provision to allow adults who were victims of childhood sexual abuse to seek justice. Rozzi said a retroactive provision that was included in House Bill 1947, which would reform the statute of limitations for civil action in Pennsylvania, was “gutted” by the Senate during the last legislative session.
Rozzi said he hopes to reintroduce the legislation with the retroactive provision during the next legislative session.
Here are three takeaways from the news conference Tuesday:
SOL ‘as a shield’
It’s no coincidence that states with the most restrictive statute of limitations laws have the biggest scandals, said Jeff Dion, an abuse survivor and the director of the National Crime Victim Bar Association.
Perpetrators know what the laws are, he said, and “they use the statutes of limitations as a shield. They know that they don’t have to keep victims quiet forever, they just have to keep them quiet long enough to run out the clock.”
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