Taking on new fight
Victim trying to abolish time limits in sex abuse cases
By the time Will Lynch was ready in the mid-1990s to report he’d been sexually abused as a child by a priest on a camping trip, there was nothing police could do about it. The abuse had happened about two decades earlier when he was 7, and the legal window then for bringing charges against the priest had closed by the time he reached 13.
Lynch and his brother sued and won a sizable legal settlement from the diocese in 1998. And Lynch was able to expose his alleged assailant and draw statewide attention to the fact that child molesters can evade prosecution after he punched the priest in Los Gatos and was tried and acquitted three years ago by a sympathetic Santa Clara County jury. But it still grates on Lynch that a legal technicality allowed the priest to escape criminal prosecution.
Now, Lynch is working to change that. He’s been cleared by the secretary of state’s office to gather signatures for a ballot measure that would wipe out
California’s criminal and civil statutes of limitations for sex crimes against children, a move already adopted by New York, Texas and Florida in criminal cases.
The initiative written by the 48-year-old San Francisco man would wipe out the legal deadline barring prosecutors from filing criminal charges against child molesters and victims from suing them after a certain period of time. It would apply only to children molested after its adoption, not to Lynch and others like him.
“It’s painfully clear that the Legislature here won’t get it done,” Lynch said. “This is a human rights abuse, and there shouldn’t be a statute of limitations on human rights violations.”
To pull it off, Lynch faces an even bigger challenge — collecting 365,880 signatures by May 9 to qualify the measure for the November ballot. He has to raise about $1.5 million to pay signature gatherers, a sizable hurdle considering there are 60 other proposed initiatives vying for financial backing, including measures to legalize marijuana and repeal the death penalty.
But Lynch has a track record of pulling off the seemingly impossible, from persuading one of the state’s leading trial lawyers to defend him in his 2012 San Jose trial for free to winning over sympathetic jurors despite his admission that he punched the Rev. Jerold Lindner, whom he says abused him when he was 7.
“Will has done an amazing job clearing a major hurdle by getting this measure approved for circulation,” said Eugene “Pat” Harris, his former Pasadena-based defense lawyer. “Hopefully a person or two will step forward with deep pockets.”
If Lynch succeeds, California would become the first state to put the issue directly before voters out of the 24 states that allow initiatives by petition.
Lynch’s alleged assailant, Lindner, was never prosecuted because the purported molestation took place in the 1970s when under the law in effect at that time Lynch would have had to report the abuse within six years — or before he turned 13 years old. In 1998, the Jesuits paid Lynch and his brother about $187,000 each after legal fees to settle a lawsuit they filed claiming Lindner had raped Lynch and made him have oral sex with his 4-year-old brother. The order also paid another camper more than $1.5 million to settle her lawsuit, and resolved another filed by one of Linder’s nieces for $786,000.
Since his surprising acquittal in 2012, Lynch has apologized for physically attacking the then-65-year-old Lindner at a Jesuit center in Los Gatos. But by choosing to go to trial rather than accept a plea bargain, Lynch gained a platform to expose Lindner and draw attention to the fact that child molesters can evade prosecution because of the time limits.
Thirty-six states already have eliminated the criminal statute of limitations for certain acts of child sexual abuse. Minnesota also has eliminated the deadline for prosecution, but only in cases with DNA evidence.
Eight states have wiped out the deadline for victims to sue, including Utah, which did so in March.
Currently in California, the legal deadline for filing criminal charges of child abuse is the victim’s 40th birthday, under a bill, authored by state Sen. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, and signed by Gov. Jerry Brown, that went into effect this year. Previously, the deadline was the victim’s 28th birthday.
To file a lawsuit in California, victims have until their 26th birthday, or within three years of the time they discover that any psychological injury or illness they have been suffering was caused by the abuse, whichever is later. Brown vetoed another bill that would have extended the filing deadline for civil damage suits over child abuse to the victims’ 40th birthday.
Both the civil and criminal deadlines on child molestation already provide much more time than victims of most crimes have. Only a few other crimes in California have no statute of limitations, including murder, aggravated rape and embezzlement of public funds.
Lynch is bound to face strong opposition if he qualifies the measure, most likely from the Roman Catholic Church and criminal defense lawyers, which have opposed past legislative efforts to lengthen or eliminate the deadlines. Neither would comment on Lynch’s initiative, saying it was premature.
In the past, criminal defense attorneys have said they are opposed because memories fade with the passage of time, making it potentially tougher for the accused to get a fair trial decades later. A spokesman for the California Catholic Conference spoke generally about the issue in a brief interview with this news organization.
“It’s a horrible crime, but the question is ‘Can you sue somebody 50 years later?’” spokesman Steve Pehanich said. “That’s why we have to encourage people to report it early.”
But supporters contend that eliminating the deadlines would be effective in deterring at least some pedophiles and would certainly bring others to justice.
“The sad, simple truth is few 8-year-olds walk down to the prosecutor’s office after school and say, ‘My stepfather is molesting me,’” said David Clohessy, a spokesman for Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, or SNAP. “So much abuse is done in the guise of love and affection and teaching about sex, so victims don’t always understand they are being abused. It can take decades to recover.”
Nationwide, efforts to eliminate both criminal and civil statutes of limitations on child sex abuse gained momentum in the wake of the scandal at Penn State and more recent allegations by women who said they were drugged years ago by comedian Bill Cosby, said Marci A. Hamilton, a Cardozo School of Law professor leading the national crusade.
The recently released movie, “Spotlight,” may also influence voters in California, said Clohessy, who was molested by a priest as a child and has seen the film six times. The movie tells the true story of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Boston Globe investigation published in 2002 that uncovered a pattern of sexual abuse of children by Roman Catholic priests in Massachusetts and a cover-up by the Boston Archdiocese.
But Lynch, who is unemployed and living off savings, first has to collect the signatures, which takes big bucks. He said he plans to drive up and down the state trying to drum up support.
“Whether I get this on the ballot this next year or in the next election cycle,” he said, “it’s going to happen.”