Key part of law helping child sex abuse victims sue is unconstitutional, NC court rules - Raleigh News & Observer

A 2019 law intended to help victims of child sex abuse sue the people who abused them — and the organizations that allowed it to happen — is unconstitutional, a North Carolina court ruled on Monday.

The law passed the legislature unanimously. It sailed through the Republican-controlled General Assembly with support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as well as Democratic Attorney General Josh Stein, who later publicly pushed for victims to use the new law to go to court.

One of the major changes in the law temporarily lifted the statute of limitations for people who were sexually abused as children to be able to sue in civil court. It allowed any sex abuse victim to file a lawsuit in 2020 or 2021, even if they would normally have been barred because the statute of limitations already expired.

That’s the piece that was ruled unconstitutional Monday.

“I am disappointed with this decision,” Stein told The News & Observer in a written statement. “I continue to believe it is constitutional and will continue to defend the law if the decision is appealed.”

Other parts of the law, like a section requiring training for teachers to spot signs of potential abuse victims, or a section making it a crime for people to fail to report child abuse to the authorities, were not challenged.

But for many advocates, the statute of limitations change was a hallmark piece of the bill.

“As a former child victim advocate and the mother of a detective who investigates crimes against children, this is deeply personal for me,” said Gastonia Sen. Kathy Harrington, the Republican Senate majority leader and a lead sponsor of the bill, when she filed it in 2019. “Victims and those who work to bring offenders to justice need all the help they can get, and this legislation strengthens our laws to do just that.”

Often victims of abuse don’t immediately come forward, for any number of reasons, especially when they are children. For those who then decide as adults to file lawsuits against their abusers, they often find that it’s too late.

So as the nation grapples with a growing “Me Too” movement — as well as the fallouts from systemic abuse scandals involving entities like the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Boy Scouts of America and USA Gymnastics — state legislators recently decided to rewrite several laws surrounding sex crimes in North Carolina.

North Carolina’s lawmakers were the first in the South to open such a window for lawsuits against all defendants, and not just individual abusers, following the example of several northern legislatures who pitched similar windows amid public outcry over sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Since the law passed here, states including Louisiana and Arkansas have followed suit.

Monday’s ruling throws a wrench into the legislature’s plans to address those issues, although it’s still possible that a higher court could reverse the ruling and let the lawsuits keep moving forward.

Headed to the Supreme Court?

One of the cases stopped by Monday’s ruling involved several former members of the wrestling team at East Gaston High School who were raped as teens by their coach, Gary Goins.

He was convicted in 2014 and sentenced to more than 34 years in prison. But the abuses had all happened more than a decade earlier. So by then the statute of limitations had run out for his victims to sue in civil court — until 2020 when the new law went into effect and allowed them to sue even despite all the time that had passed.

Three of Goins’ victims filed a lawsuit in 2020 against him and the Gaston County Board of Education. The school board fought it, and they won at trial on Monday. A panel of judges ruled 2-1 that the law is unconstitutional.

The two judges in the majority, Gregory Horne and Imelda Pate, stressed that they felt bound by precedent. In a ruling that sounded almost apologetic at times, they suggested that the issue might be “better suited” for the North Carolina Supreme Court to take up, instead of them.

“Hard cases must not make bad law,” they wrote, ruling that previous case law says the state constitution does bar the legislature from re-opening the statute of limitations, even for “meritorious causes of action.”

The other judge on the panel, Martin McGee, dissented. He disagreed with his colleagues’ analysis and said he would have ruled that the legislature can make such a change — as long as it passes the legal test of whether the change had a rational basis.

“A law providing an avenue in our civil courts for victims of child sexual abuse to hold accountable child abusers, and their enablers, for past actions involving and arising from child sexual abuse undoubtedly would survive” that test, he wrote.

In North Carolina, all constitutional challenges have to go before a three-judge panel instead of just a single judge for their original trial, consisting of Superior Court judges from around the state. Horne is from a western judicial district stretching from Boone to just outside Asheville, Pate is from an eastern district centered around Kinston, and McGee is from Cabarrus County in the Charlotte suburbs.

In addition to the Gaston County Schools case, the ruling on Monday also affected a case involving the Piney Grove Fire and Rescue Department, and a victim who had been abused by a firefighter at an after-school program. It wasn’t immediately clear if the victims in one or both cases planned to appeal the decision, or what immediate impact the ruling will have on other related lawsuits going forward.

Staff writer Sara Coello contributed reporting.

For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Under the Dome politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it at link.chtbl.com/underthedomenc or wherever you get your podcasts.

This story was originally published December 20, 2021 5:15 PM.

source: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/politics-government/article256739797.html

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