Louisiana High Court: Priests Have a "Property Right" Not to Be Sued For Sexual Abuse

[Passages]

Must be nice to be a sexual predator and receive legal protection of your assets.

The legal system will never run out of ways to transform real-world harms into meaningless abstractions—all in service of insulating the wealthy and powerful from accountability.

LEGAL CULTURE
STATE SUPREME COURTS
BY STEVE KENNEDY APRIL 9, 2024

When you think of the Due Process Clause of the Constitution, which says that no one shall be “deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law,” what rights do you imagine this language protecting? Perhaps the right not to be imprisoned by the government without a fair trial, or the right to be free of unjustified police confiscations of your belongings. According to a 4-3 Louisiana Supreme Court majority in Bienvenu v. Diocese of Lafayette, though, a due process right you may have failed to consider is the right of priests and their enablers not to be held accountable by victims of their sexual abuse.

Over the course of years in the 1970s, several boys between the ages of eight and fourteen in St. Martinville, Louisiana, were repeatedly sexually assaulted by their parish priest, suffering serious physical and emotional trauma. Like most child sexual abuse survivors, they did not disclose the abuse until they were in their fifties and sixties. Recognizing the developmental and emotional difficulties preventing survivors from disclosing childhood abuse, in 2021, the Louisiana legislature unanimously passed the Louisiana Child Victims Act, which provided a three-year “look-back window” allowing survivors to file lawsuits that would otherwise be barred by the statute of limitations. The law, versions of which have been passed in about half of states, finally allowed the St. Martinville survivors to sue the church and diocese that harbored their abuser.

Enter the Louisiana Supreme Court. In an opinion written by Justice James Genovese and published on March 22, the court found an absolute property right in the institutions’ right not to be sued. The Louisiana Child Victims Act, wrote Genovese, “cannot be retroactively applied to revive plaintiffs’ prescribed causes of action,” since that would “divest defendants of their vested right to plead prescription”—to defend themselves by asserting that the statute of limitations had run. The decision essentially strikes down the look-back window, leaving survivors once again powerless to hold their abusers accountable. It is a harrowing example of the legal system’s ability to obscure the nature of disputes and turn survivors’ real-life trauma into euphemistic abstractions, while at the same time protecting powerful institutions in the name of otherwise ephemeral property rights.
https://ballsandstrikes.org/legal-culture/louisiana-supreme-court-church-abuse-case/

[Freethinker65]

1. Assuming the historical statute of limitations is adhered to in every legal matter,

I think the court was correct. Unfortunately, according to the old law, if you committed some wrongs, however heinous, you could get away with the behavior if you were not accused/charged of it within a set time period.
The new law took effect when it was passed for future incidents.

Just my opinion. I am not in the legal profession.

[Passages]

2. One would hope as a society we will see laws reflect our present knowledge/

science of sexual abuse of minors. They have historically been disadvantaged on many levels, and now it is ruled for them to receive no reparation.

[Freethinker65]

5. I agree with the sentiment.

Undoing historical wrongs is complicated. In this case, it appears there was an established statute of limitations for such behaviors. The new law was found to not be enforceable retroactively. The new law should be helpful to any parties wronged after the date of passage that for personal reasons wait years/decades to speak up.

[EYESORE 9001]

3. It's Louisiana

I too am not a legal expert in any sense of the word, however, I hear that their legal system is like no other state’s. Holdovers from the Napoleonic Code and the like.

[Freethinker65]

4. Exactly. Give credit that a law was passed for future incidents.