Child sex abuse victims deserve legal justice

Victims who want access to a courtroom should not have to wait two more years because of government error.

Child sexual abuse victims long denied justice in Pennsylvania should have been celebrating a hard-fought legal victory this week. The Senate was teed up for second and final passage of a constitutional amendment that, had voters approved it in May, would finally have lifted the statute of limitations and opened a two-year window for them to sue their abusers and the institutions that enabled them.

Instead they learned that the Pennsylvania Department of State had failed to advertise the proposed amendment as required by law, a dumbfounding oversight that foiled years of advocacy and reset the clock. The earliest a constitutional amendment could now reach a ballot is 2023.

Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said she learned of the mistake a week ago and rightly submitted her resignation. But the harm can’t be minimized.

The breakdown delivered crushing disappointment and pain to advocates including clergy-abuse survivor Rep. Mark Rozzi, D-Berks, who has labored for more than a decade to advance justice for victims.

And it represented generally the kind of fecklessness that erodes confidence in government.

Lawmakers and the Governor’s Office, through transparent, bipartisan means, must investigate and ensure nothing like this happens again.

That said, Republican leaders’ leveraging of this crisis to revive debunked, partisan attacks on Boockvar’s handling of the state’s free and fair 2020 election strike us as opportunistic and distracting. The focus now, as it ever should have been, must be on the victims, and this certainly is not the first time they have been failed in Pennsylvania.

It is true that many Republican lawmakers, especially former Republican Senate President Pro Tempore Joe Scarnati, along with powerful insurance and church lobbyists, long argued that lifting the statute of limitations via legislation would be unconstitutional and also cost the church too much.

But there has never been consensus — including among Republicans — that passing legislation to temporarily lift the statute of limitations would violate the constitution.

Experts such as Marci Hamilton, a University of Pennsylvania

law professor and statute of limitations reform advocate, have long maintained that lawmakers could take legislative action to temporarily restore victims’ rights to sue, as so many other states have done.

Recall that when the last push for reform peaked in October 2018, with the Republicancontrolled House supporting legislation that would temporarily lift the statute of limitations, Scarnati abandoned his constitutional objections and agreed to open courtroom doors temporarily to victims — but only to sue perpetrators, not the deep-pocketed institutions that enabled them.

The reform effort collapsed in the face of that unacceptable compromise. Advocates like Rozzi and Rep. Jim Gregory, RBlair, pivoted to seek a constitutional amendment.

The mess left victims who wanted justice in a terrible position — forced to choose between filing the claim with a diocese or wait in uncertain hope that a constitutional amendment would pass and give them access to independent justice. Some did not wait, but braved legal uncertainty and pressed their claims in court anyway.

We cannot ask them to wait any longer and we owe them a clear, expedient, legal path forward.

Years-long, successive pushes to temporarily restore the right of victims to sue arose not from a vacuum, but at the recommendation of the grand juries who presided over galling investigations over the past two decades that exposed serial clergy sexual abuse of children and cover-up in Pennsylvania Roman Catholic dioceses.

According to Spotlight PA, Democratic lawmakers early this week raised two possible options as alternatives to a constitutional amendment — legislation or an emergency constitutional amendment.

Expert opinions and Republicans’ previous willingness to drop their constitutional objections indicate this situation is more legally pliable than the constitutional posturing suggests. Lawmakers must act.

Victims who want access to a courtroom — where Americans resolve their differences under the law — should not have to wait two more years.

Open the doors now.