BATON ROUGE (LA)
The Guardian [London, England]
June 12, 2024
By Ramon Antonio Vargas and David Hammer
With major implication for state’s Catholic church, court allows victims to sue over decades-old abuse
[See also the Louisiana Supreme Court opinion.]
Louisiana’s state supreme court on Wednesday reversed its decision to strike down a law that allowed child-molestation victims to file civil lawsuits over long-ago abuse.
The decision affects all alleged abusers and their enablers – but it is particularly significant for Louisiana’s Roman Catholic church, which is facing hundreds of decades-old claims of child molestation in various state and federal courts.
The state supreme court’s earlier decision would have given the New Orleans church leverage to settle about 500 such claims for pennies on the dollar.
Instead, those claims all have standing to proceed under a 2021 law allowing what is known as a “lookback window”, retroactively eliminating statutes of limitations for filing such claims.
The 2021 lookback window, reinforced unanimously by the state’s legislature in 2022, was set to expire on 14 June. But the reversal by the supreme court also means a new law, which the Louisiana legislature passed in May to extend the lookback window another three years to 2027, is also constitutional.
The Louisiana state senator sponsoring the extended lookback window, Jay Luneau, cheered Wednesday’s reversal. “We’ve seen … a lot of religious organizations where they’ve covered up this abuse, and this is going to send a clear message that you can run, but you can’t hide,” he said.
Lawyers Richard Trahant, Soren Giselson and John Denenea, who represent clergy-molestation claimants in the case at the center of Wednesday’s ruling, issued a statement saying: “This is a great day for both the children of Louisiana and adult survivors of child sexual abuse. We are already hearing from many of our clients, and they are sincerely appreciative of the … Louisiana supreme court justices who held this remarkable law to be constitutional.”
The five of the court’s justices who voted to reverse the decision in March to declare the so-called lookback window law unconstitutional were the same ones who in May said they wanted to reconsider the matter: chief judge John Weimer, Scott Crichton, William Crain, Jay McCallum and Piper Griffin.
Crichton and Griffin in March had formed part of the majority that struck down the lookback law but then helped grant only the second out of 19 rehearing requests since the start of 2023.
Crichton concurred with the majority by writing that he essentially gave too much weight to property rights over the right to due process when he voted to strike down the law earlier this year.
Griffin noted in her concurrence that “vested rights” mentioned in previous versions of Louisiana’s state constitution had been removed from the latest version, ratified 50 years ago. Once she accepted that, Griffin said she agreed with the majority that the lookback window “relates to a legitimate government interest” and is, therefore, constitutional.
Justices Jefferson Davis Hughes III and James Genovese dissented from the majority, with the latter on Wednesday saying he feared the court was setting “a bad precedent [that] has the potential of opening Pandora’s box”.
Even the judges who switched their votes, Crichton and Griffin, warned the legislature not to make a habit of reviving expired lawsuits, with the former saying that should be reserved for the most extreme circumstances.
The court had previously said alleged abusers and their enablers had a “vested” property right to not be sued after the statute of limitations had expired. Now, the court has prioritized abuse survivors’ rights to due process.
Kristi Schubert, who represents numerous clergy-abuse survivors, said the supreme court had “set things right again”. The state’s attorney general, Liz Murrill, noted how rare it was for the court to reverse itself and called the decision “a win for victims of sexual assault and those who have been silenced for far too long. A great day for Louisiana.”
Richard Windmann, president of Survivors of Childhood Sex Abuse, said his thoughts were with abuse survivors who had died in the years leading up to Wednesday’s decision. “But now we face a new day,” Windmann said. “And survivors have a path to justice now – the lookback law is the law of the land, and that’s what we always wanted for them.”
Though the lookback-window law didn’t exclusively apply to Louisiana’s victims of clergy abuse, the state’s conference of Catholic bishops was the only institution that opposed its passage in 2021.
That organization is led by the archbishop of New Orleans, Gregory Aymond, whose archdiocese filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2020 while faced with a mound of lawsuits over clergy abuse mostly from long ago. Attorneys for the church have long maintained that those cases had been filed years beyond key deadlines as they sought to settle the disputes as cheaply as possible.
Furthermore, it was the Roman Catholic diocese of Lafayette that requested the ruling in March that declared the law unconstitutional. And the diocese received a key supporting brief from perhaps New Orleans’s most famed Catholic high school: Jesuit, which has also spent years grappling with several clergy-abuse lawsuits.
But the political tone surrounding the Catholic church has shifted significantly since the publicly elected state supreme court’s decision to strike down the lookback window in March.
In April, as WWL Louisiana and the Guardian first reported, Louisiana state police served a search warrant as part of an investigation into the archdiocese of New Orleans for child sex-trafficking and a cover-up over many decades.
Additionally, the news outlets exposed the sealed, videotaped testimony of the self-admitted pedophile priest Lawrence Hecker confessing to several instances of child molestation and describing how Catholic church leaders had repeatedly failed to report his crimes to law enforcement.
The archdiocese said it respected Wednesday’s decision.
Hecker is awaiting trial on allegations of child rape and kidnapping, first reported to church officials in 1975 but not charged by prosecutors until last September. The inquiry that produced those charges evolved into the child sex-trafficking investigation involving the archdiocese.
On Thursday, the 92-year-old Hecker is scheduled to be in court as a state judge weighs whether he has the mental competence necessary to stand trial.