ALBUQUERQUE (NM)
Albuquerque Journal
May 5, 2019
By Colleen Heild
New Mexico was poised this year to join a wave of states nationwide that are allowing victims of child sex crimes more time to report their perpetrators for possible criminal prosecution.
A last-minute clerical error derailed that effort – at least for this year.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said she was forced to veto the legislation last month, because her legal team found a fatal flaw that would have given some victims even less time to report the crime than they have under current law.
The bill cleared its final legislative hurdle on the final day of the session that ended March 16 and was sent on to the governor.
“Nobody caught it before,” said the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jeff Steinborn, D-Las Cruces. “If we had, it would have been an easy thing to fix.”
The governor’s veto message said she agreed with the premise of SB55, which was intended to extend the deadlines for prosecuting offenders who commit certain sexual assaults of children. But the version approved by the Legislature, Lujan Grisham wrote, “fails to achieve this goal due to what is likely a technical drafting error.”
Under the new legislation, for example, prosecutions for second-degree criminal sexual penetration of a child could have commenced any time until the victim reached age 30 – six years longer than provided by current law.
But the flawed final measure also inadvertently reduced the statute of limitations for prosecuting criminal sexual contact of a minor to within five or six years after the offense. Under current law, the victim could be up to 23 or 24 years old, depending on the degree of felony, before a prosecution is barred by the passage of time.
Steinborn said that in drafting revised legislation, someone forgot to include the offense of criminal sexual contact of a minor, which had been in prior versions. What was missing was the statute number, “30-9-13.”
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