In opening criminal cases against four former and retired Roman Catholic priests last week, Southern California prosecutors are relying on a 1994 California law that has become a national model for overcoming legal time limits on decades-old child molestation cases.
Without the law, which was upheld by a sharply divided state Supreme Court in 1999, the cases against the priests almost certainly would not have proceeded, prosecutors said.
After the California law was enacted, 40 other states passed extended time limits to bring charges in cases of sexual abuse of children. Some of those states now say they did not go far enough and are seeking even tougher laws to help them prosecute more clergy abuse cases.
That is most notably true in Massachusetts, where the Boston archdiocese has been the center of the priest sex abuse scandal. The California law retroactively lifted the statute of limitations for cases of serious child molestation. Under the law, prosecutors are allowed to file criminal charges up to one year after a victim first reports the abuse to police, regardless of how long ago the crime occurred.
"It has been incredibly useful and very important," said Irene Wakabayashi, assistant head deputy of the Los Angeles district attorney's sex crimes division. "Certainly the priest cases we wouldn't have been able to file without the extended statute of limitations."
Last week, prosecutors in Los Angeles and Orange counties filed their first criminal charges against former priests since the sex scandal broke nine months ago. In Los Angeles, prosecutors charged Michael Stephen Baker, 54, with 29 counts of molestation, including oral copulation, against a boy between 1976 and 1985. Baker has not entered a plea.
Prosecutors charged Carlos Rene Rodriguez, 46, with eight counts of committing lewd acts with a child under age 14 between 1986 and 1987. He has pleaded not guilty.
A third former Los Angeles priest, G. Neville Rucker, has been charged with 23 counts of child molestation between 1947 and 1976.
In Orange County, Gerald John Plesetz, 59, was charged with three counts of oral copulation with a minor under age 16 between 1972 and 1974.
The 1994 law shaped the nature of the charges against the former priests and sets the parameters for their trials.
Under the law, prosecutors face three major legal hurdles:
