North Carolina’s highest court hears challenge to law allowing more time for child sex abuse suits
RALEIGH, NC — Objections to a portion of a state law that gave adult victims of child sexual abuse an extra two years to seek civil damages dominated oral arguments in cases heard by the North Carolina Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The state Supreme Court heard five cases in one day from individuals who filed lawsuits based on changes passed by the General Assembly through the SAFE Child Act of 2019 and signed by Gov. Roy Cooper.
Before the law, victims of sexual abuse before the age of 18 effectively had until the age of 21 to file such civil claims against perpetrators. Now, such victims have until the age of 28.
Most of the cases heard Wednesday focused on another part of the law that allowed other victims whose window to litigate had expired to file lawsuits seeking damages for child sexual abuse. They were allowed to file lawsuits from January 2020 through December 2021.
Supporters of the two-year scheme argue that it would give victims the guarantee that their abusers and the institutions that allowed the abuse to be compensated, and that abusers would be publicly held accountable.
In Wednesday’s opening statement, an attorney for the Gaston County Board of Education argued that the lookback period violates the North Carolina Constitution by stripping away fundamental rights protected from retroactive change by the Legislature. The board is seeking to have the provision declared unconstitutional and the lawsuit dismissed.
The school board is a defendant in a 2020 lawsuit filed by three former Gaston County student-athletes who also sued a high school coach convicted of crimes against team members. In the case, a divided state appeals court ruled Last year the panel maintained the two-year window as constitutional.
According to a legal report by the council, at least 250 child sex abuse lawsuits were filed in North Carolina within a two-year period, many of which stemmed from allegations that date back 40 or 50 years.
Attorneys for the former students and the state, which intervened in the lawsuit and is defending the two-year period, said there is nothing in the state Constitution that prevents the General Assembly from giving victims this opportunity to seek damages.
“It is inconceivable to me that the good people of North Carolina, in adopting any version of their Constitution, would ever have intended to prevent the General Assembly from implementing a public policy that recognizes the profound harm suffered by sexually abused children and decides to give them a limited period of time to file a claim and seek justice,” Bobby Jenkins, the former students’ attorney, told the court.
Gaston County coach Gary Scott Goins was convicted in 2014 of 17 sex-related crimes and sentenced to at least 34 years in prison. Goins was previously dismissed as a defendant in the current lawsuit, according to a court ruling.
School board attorney Robert King told the justices that children must be protected. The General Assembly helped with other provisions in the 2019 law.
But keeping the window in place would make it impossible for some institutions to mount robust defenses, given the passage of time and long-destructed records, King said, and open the door to the revival of other types of civil claims. Felony child abuse charges have no statute of limitations and can carry lengthy sentences.
“If someone is going to be deterred from abusing children, if that’s possible, it’s by threatening to spend the rest of their life in prison,” King said. “It’s not by reviving a 50-year-old civil claim, which is usually against the bad actor’s former employer.”
The court gave no indication when it would rule. At least three of the six justices hearing the case — not Associate Justice Allison Riggs, who recused herself, since she wrote the appeals court opinion while on the lower court — questioned King’s arguments.
According to CHILD USA, a think tank that advocates for children’s civil rights and sexual abuse prevention, since 2002, 30 states and the District of Columbia have revived previously expired child sexual abuse claims with limited or permanent extensions of the claim deadlines.
The Supreme Court also heard arguments Wednesday in a case involving a man who filed a lawsuit alleging that a Catholic layperson sexually abused him in the early 1980s. The lawsuit seeks damages from the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte and the Glenmary Home Missioners, a group of priests and laypeople who work primarily in rural areas.
A trial judge dismissed claims against the Catholic groups, saying that language in the law allowing a two-year claim period for “any civil action for child sexual abuse” covered only claims against the perpetrator of the sexual abuse — not against institutions. But the Court of Appeals reversed that decision.