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US Supreme Court rules on prosecuting sex crimes

The US Supreme Court dealt a serious defeat on Thursday to prosecutors who pursue suspects accused of molesting children, ruling, five to four, that the government cannot erase statutes of limitations retroactively.

The decision struck down that part of a California law that allowed prosecutions of people accused of committing sex crimes many years before, after old statutes of limitations had expired. The ruling is also expected to call into question a law permitting prosecutions for terrorist crimes for which the statute of limitations has expired.

Until 1993, sex crimes could not be prosecuted in California after three years had elapsed after the offense.

But the Legislature changed the law that year, making it possible to prosecute people accused of committing such crimes against children years and even decades earlier.

Under the new law, an adult could at any time give evidence of having been the victim of a sexual offense before the age of 18, and prosecutors had a year in which to act.

The ruling does not affect prosecutions for offenses committed after the law expanding the time limits took effect.

So it would be possible, for instance, for an accused person to be prosecuted 20 years from now for an offense in 1993 or after.

The case, Stogner vs California, No. 01-1757, involves Marion Stogner, who was charged in 1998 with having molested his children almost a half-century before.

Statutes of limitations vary from state to state and crime to crime, depending on their seriousness, with murder having no statute of limitations.

Breyer noted that courts had often supported extensions of those statutes before they expired, but not revival of them after they expired.

"Memories fade, and witnesses can die or disappear," Breyer wrote. "Such problems can plague child-abuse cases, where recollection after so many years may be uncertain, and `recovered' memories faulty, but may nonetheless lead to prosecutions that destroy families."

Stogner's two adult daughters have said he molested them from 1955 to 1973. They made the accusations to police officers who were investigating accusations of child abuse elsewhere in the extended family.

The California Supreme Court upheld the state law in 1999. Stogner's lawyers attacked his prosecution on constitutional grounds, and he has not gone to trial.

The high court's ruling on Thursday may have made it impossible for prosecutors to try him.
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