Speak up, Speak up - You Say You Want to Remain Silent?

by Katherine Scardino

On June 1, 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court watered down a legacy of constitutional rights afforded to all of us.

Who hasn't heard of Miranda rights? My guess is that nearly every U.S. citizen knows about Miranda. It's not uncommon for those I represent to say to me, “Hey, man, that cop didn't read me my rights.” They know that suspects in a criminal investigation have the right to be informed that everything they say can and will be used against them in a court of law. They have to be told that they have the right to a lawyer and the right to refuse to answer questions.

Let's take a look at Miranda v. Arizona. In 1966, Mr. Ernesto Miranda (photo right), a day laborer who'd been convicted and sentenced to 20 to 30 years for rape, kidnapping, and armed robbery, got a second bite at the apple after a history-making Supreme Court decision. The justices ruled that Miranda needed to have been informed of his rights before being interrogated. Afterward Miranda was retried and again found guilty. Ironically, he was sentenced to the identical number of years. Yet while Ernesto Miranda's fate remained unchanged, the "Miranda rights" birthed by his successful appeal had a major impact on American justice.

Based on this landmark decision, it was clear that if a citizen was arrested, he had to be informed of his rights before being questioned. To assure that happened, suspects were asked to initial next to each right as it was read to them. That didn't mean that they couldn't talk to police. If after being told their rights they wanted to make a statement, that was allowed, but only after they signed a waiver in front of a witness. In a very real sense, as U.S. citizens, Miranda was our security blanket. The ruling became so integral a part of our justice system that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist once said: “the warnings have become part of our national culture” (Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428 (2000). Like the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, the right to be informed of our constitutional rights by law enforcement appeared inalienable.

That's not to say that there haven't been challenges. Over the years, there have been many assaults on our Miranda rights. For instance, in Missouri v. Seibert, 542 U.S. 600 (2004), the Supreme Court halted a controversial practice by police, who withheld Miranda warnings until after they obtained confessions. Despite these frequent official transgressions, however, we've always managed to maintain at least the ruling's spirit.

That is until now. Again, remember that to give a statement without counsel, one that could later be used against him in a trial, the accused had to sign a witnessed document specifically waiving his rights. That was before Berghuis v. Thompkins. You want to invoke your right to remain silent? Great. But post-Berghuis refusing to sign the waiver and remaining silent isn't enough. Now, you'd better speak up and spell out your intentions!

In the Berghuis case, the Supreme Court held that suspects must specifically inform police officers that they are invoking their rights, both to remain silent and that they want a lawyer. In practice, this means that police can keep interrogating a suspect who refuses to talk as long as they want in hopes that the person will crack and start talking. According to his appeal, Thompkins did just that. He refused to sign the waiver and remained silent for three hours, while police bombarded him with questions, before he finally implicated himself in a Michigan murder. Based on his "confession," Thompkins was convicted. He appealed, insisting that the questioning should never have taken place, because by refusing to sign the waiver and remaining silent for hours, he had invoked his Miranda rights. The court decided against him.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a strong dissent, stating her fellow justices' decision “turns Miranda upside down.” She wrote: “Criminal suspects must now unambiguously invoke their right to remain silent - which counterintuitively requires them to speak.... At the same time, suspects will be legally presumed to have waived their rights even if they have given no clear expression of their intent to do so. Those results, in my view, find no basis in Miranda or our subsequent cases and are inconsistent with the fair-trial principles on which those precedents are grounded.”

In the Berghuis case, Thompkins was questioned for three hours without making a statement. Then police asked him if he prayed for forgiveness for “shooting that boy down,” and the suspect said one word: “Yes.” Justice Sotomayor said that to believe that a suspect waived his right to remain silent by making an uncoerced statement to police is “a substantial retreat from the protection against compelled self-incrimination that Miranda v. Arizona has long provided during custodial interrogation.”

Many people applaud this expansion of the rights of police. However, think of it this way: You or one of your children is arrested for a DWI. How fast do you call a lawyer? How fast do you want to know your rights and to be sure that these rights are protected and exercised? No one wants a culture where it is acceptable for police to coerce confessions, using either psychological or physical means, or to interrogate citizens for hours and hours at a time without stopping, hoping the suspect will crack. But the Berghuis case holds that you and I can no longer invoke our rights by remaining silent. You must speak up.

What do you think?

Read More

"Claiming Bloody Innocence"

by Susan Murphy Milano

On June 14, 2007, exactly three years ago this past Monday, Kimberly Ellen Vaughn, 34; Abigayle Elizabeth Vaughn, 12; Cassandra Ellen Vaughn, 11; and Blake Phillip Vaughn, 9, were found shot to death in a red SUV parked among a grove of trees in Will County, Illinois.

The only survivor of this gruesome tragedy is Kimberly's husband, Christopher Vaughn, who had minor gunshot wounds to his thigh and wrist. A former private investigator, Vaughn claims the family was headed to a water park when he pulled the SUV over because his wife “suddenly became ill.” What happened next is the crux of this case. Vaughn admits that he'd brought along a 9mm handgun on the family outing. Yet he claims that he didn't pull the trigger. In Vaughn's version, his dead wife suffered from severe depression and abused prescription drugs. She was suicidal, and he was simply another victim. The shooter that day, according to Vaughn, was Kimberly, who shot him and murdered the children before turning the gun on herself.

On this, the Vaughns' 13th wedding anniversary, Kimberly died of a single bullet to the chin, while each of her children suffered two gunshot wounds to their bodies. At least one piece of forensic evidence calls Vaughn's account into question; Kimberly had no gun reside on her hands.

It appears that authorities believe what I do, that the gunshot wounds Vaughn suffered were self inflicted, and that Kimberly wasn't the one pulling the trigger. Just hours before she and the children were to be buried, nine days after the murders, investigators arrived at the funeral home to take this low-life piece of human garbage into custody, charging him with eight counts of first-degree murder.

We'll never know if Vaughn had GSR, gunshot residue, on his hands; he wasn't tested at the scene. Since the day of the murders, he has claimed that he has no memory of the events, suffering from some bizarre form of amnesia. It seems absurd in the face of his actions that day, especially flagging down a vehicle for help and then conversing normally with the driver who called 911.

The trial date isn't set yet, but in the courtroom, the prosecution will have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Vaughn planned and carried out the murders. For motive, they'll point to a $1 million dollar insurance policy Vaughn took out on Kimberly’s life. For the time being, the accused murderer hasn't been able to collect. Under the “Illinois slayer statue” unless Vaughan is acquitted he won’t see a dime. However, there are more problems with the way the case was handled than that Vaughn's hands weren't tested for gunshot residue at the scene. Another crucial piece of evidence, a towel, was rendered useless when it was mistakenly washed at the Will County morgue.

The defense will no doubt use investigators' mistakes to their advantage, along with pointing at prescription drugs Kimberly took for migraines as evidence of her "depression." Sprinkle in a parade of neighbors the defense will undoubtedly call to show what a loving, wonderful father their client is, and you can predict the prosecutions' problems. I expect the defense team to play a full symphony complete with violins casting doubt before the case finally goes before a jury.

Why hasn't this case received more publicity? Soon after the murders the case was sealed by a judge. In that way, the Vaughn case is different than that of former Bolingbrook police Sgt. Drew Peterson, who will be tried next month in the same county for the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. The result is that in the Vaughn murders, the prosecution and the defense have the opportunity to try their case in a court of law minus the Peterson case's media circus.

Although I try to be mindful that a person is always innocent until proven guilty, I have a difficult time believing any other result than that Christopher Vaughn should receive the death penalty.

Read More

The Facebook Fugitives

by Donna Pendergast

Craig "Lazie" Lynch was incarcerated on an aggravated burglary charge at Hollesley Bay Prison in southern England. Last September he escaped the minimum security facility by walking away; he began a life on the run. But rather than seek anonymity, the effusive escapee began to taunt police with profanity-laced insults on his Facebook  page, bragging of steak dinners, girlfriends and the free life.

One picture (left), posted around Christmas time, shows him shirtless with a cooked turkey in one hand, middle finger raised on the other, and a strand of tinsel garland around his neck. The caption in his Facebook information box said: "life is what you make it, live fast die young." His arrogant updates included "Craig Lazie Lynch is thinkin' which lucky girl will be my first of 2010" and "I've got a fantastic video, me watching the London firework display, surrounded by thousands of incompetent pigs."

Lynch's Facebook page was shut down after authorities contacted Facebook looking for information as to his whereabouts. Lynch responded with a new Facebook page named Maximus Justice, where he began an even bolder string of taunts. By the time he was recaptured in January, he'd become a web celebrity with nearly 40,000 Facebook fans. He was even the subject of a song written by American country singer Kent Crawford titled, naturally, "Crazy Craig Lazy Lynch."

If you think this sounds familiar, you are right. In March, I posted a blog on Colton Harris-Moore, the one-man crime wave from Seattle who walked away from a halfway house. He's achieved mythic status for his daredevil crimes and open mockery of the police. His exploits have earned him a large Facebook following and attracted national media attention. Like Lynch, he has also inspired a song, called "The Ballad of Barefoot Harris." Harris-Moore remains on the lam despite the offer of $50,000 to turn himself in. The offer expired last Tuesday at 3:00 p.m., and the money, which had been placed in a trust account by a Washington lawyer, is being returned to its anonymous donor.

While Lynch openly courted fame, Harris-Moore's fame has grown due to his uncanny ability to pull off crimes that seem straight out of the movies while continuing to evade arrest. Nonetheless, both fugitives acquired a large fan base on Facebook and cult-hero status for escaping from custody and making a mockery of the police. Lynch has been called a "Digital Dillinger," and Harris-Moore has been compared to Jesse James (without the murders) and D.B. Cooper.

So why, as a culture, do we romanticize criminals who defy the system? Is it because many of us like to challenge authority -- vicariously? From Robin Hood to Jesse James, people rally around the defender of the common people, pitted against the oppression or corruption of the established power structure. But Robin Hood at least took from the rich to feed the poor.

Lynch and Harris-Moore benefit no one other than themselves. They feed nothing but their own egos with their escapades, and by publicly taunting police and any efforts to rein in their criminal, self-serving behavior. Yet their numerous Facebook followers suggest people admire their exploits rather than condemn their anti-social behavior.

In these days of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites, heroes can be created and immortalized almost overnight. The glorification of criminals on social networking sites is the latest twist on a recurring theme that suggests a complex dynamic where normally upstanding citizens harbor a strange affinity for certain criminal behavior.

The perception of crime as glamorous is all too commonplace in the impoverished inner-city. Youths with little future fear police while looking up to the power and status of easy money from drug-dealing and brutal displays of violence meant to keep people in line and ensure loyalty. One can only hope that the public interest in Facebook criminals is more fascination than true admiration.

Statements made in this post are my own and do not reflect the views, opinion or position of the Michigan Attorney General or the Michigan Department of Attorney General.

Read More

An Unwritten Law

by Laura James

Love triangles turned deadly have been around longer than David and Bathsheba and Uriah, and you know the ending of that story (unless you skipped your true crime lessons from Sunday School). In Michigan in the mid-1950s, the last chapter of a classic love triangle was written in a courthouse, as they so often are these days.

But this case was so sensational that the story achieved national prominence; thousands of articles delved into the details of the tawdry affair; the press of the crowd seeking admittance at the trial shattered two glass doors to the courtroom; and the verdict was a shock only to those who believe in strictly codifying human behavior.

The matter aroused so much interest because the participants were all very beautiful and very wealthy but had the habits and bad taste of the lowest sorts. So many people were touched by this not-all-that-long-ago love disaster that it seems appropriate to change the names. There’s no other mention of the case on the internet.

So meet “Madame Bovary.” Let’s call her Emma. The press will call her “an oval-faced brunette.” In 1944, she was caught in a whirlwind romance in Ann Arbor, falling in love with Kevin, a dental school student, on the eve of his graduation from the University of Michigan. He was six feet tall, dark-haired, and very handsome. They married soon thereafter, and he joined the Navy. She became a loyal military wife and they had three sons together.

After his military service honorably ended, Kevin settled his family in Detroit near Emma’s parents, who loved them both and lavished them with thousands of dollars, setting up Kevin’s dental practice and buying them a mansion. They had servants and a nurse to care for the boys. Imagine Emma as Mrs. Cleaver, in dress, heels, and pearls, but without the vacuum cleaner.

It was then that Emma grew restless and dissatisfied with her husband. She would later describe the eighth and ninth year of their marriage as a “clash of ideologies.” She wanted Kevin to be a “bigger man,” but his main interests seemed to lie only in his home, his family, and his work. “It isn’t anything tangible and it’s hard to explain,” she would say about her curious abstractions. “Kevin never gave me credit for decisions and we had a lot of arguments. I never cared for money as money. I felt it was to be used for the things one wanted. For instance, if I wanted a stick of bubble gum and it made me happy, it should make him happy too.”

Then Emma’s father died, and she inherited a large amount of money. She took to vacationing without her husband and hanging out with divorcees, and sooner rather than later she met Jack, a wealthy industrialist and New York playboy who hung out at the “21 Club” when he was in town and jet-setted across the country. Emma was introduced to him in Florida, and they had three unforgettable dates. On the night she returned to Detroit, Emma told Kevin she wanted a divorce.

The news transformed Kevin in an instant. He turned to drink for the first time in his life and became alternately abusive and pathetic. He hit her once. He threatened suicide. There were scenes featuring a brandished pistol. He pleaded with her. “Even a dog is entitled to another chance,” he told her. But she locked him out of the bedroom. Kevin threatened to knock it down. She called the police from the bedroom phone.

A few days later, she left for New York to be with Jack. When her husband begged for their marriage, she told him to see a psychiatrist. “He told me I should see one,” she said, “that it was I who was all mixed up.” Meanwhile, Kevin moved to a hotel and immersed himself in self-help books like Wake Up And Live.

After Emma filed for divorce, she had a rendezvous with Jack several hours from Detroit in a summer house in Douglas, Michigan. It was no cottage -- there were servants and gardeners and a stunning view of Lake Michigan sunsets. But Emma began to miss her children, or so she said. She phoned home. Kevin happened to answer. An argument followed – “I thought you were in Chicago!” was in the earful Kevin gave her.

The next thing she knew – as she sat on a couch in the summer home, reading a magazine, the lake’s swells singing in the background -- she heard her husband’s voice at the front door, followed by pistol shots. Kevin had tracked them down and promptly shot Jack twice in the chest.

Kevin was imprisoned in the Allegan County jail and put on trial two months later. The case was an exercise in histrionics. Emma bolted from the room several times while others were testifying. Kevin’s father collapsed and had to be carried out. The judge had to hand out tickets in advance after the crowd smashed the glass doors. Journalists came from hundreds of miles around for this one, and each witness was a spectacle.

Kevin’s money bought a good defense – he argued he was not guilty by reason of insanity. Three psychiatrists testified that he was “definitely insane,” in a “post-psychotic stage,’ at the time he killed Jack. The murder was the result of extraordinary events, one expert said; “it’s like striking a match – once you strike it, you don’t strike it again.”

Kevin himself was on the witness stand for less than ten minutes. “I can’t say what I did. I can’t say what I did. I don’t know.”

When the jury retired to deliberate, Kevin spent the night in his jail cell, praying with his cell mate, rereading the many letters sent to him, the only lights he had in the nightmare. Then in the wee hours of Saturday came word that the verdict had been reached. The jury found him not guilty by reason of insanity.

At once, the flash bulbs started popping off, and the expression they caught on Kevin’s face is pure relief. His last words in the courthouse: “I never knew people could be so nice.”

Kevin spent three months at Michigan’s Hospital for the Criminally Insane before the pretense was dropped and he was released. Emma divorced him – he didn’t contest it – and their real names are now quite forgotten.

The legal lesson remains -- statutory prohibitions on murder are sometimes trumped by an older, unwritten law.

Read More

Will Joran Get Away with Murder Again?

by Diane Fanning

Many feel Joran van der Sloot should be behind bars for the murder of Natalee Holloway.  Instead, he's been traipsing around the world.  Now, it may be time for him to pay--unfortunately, another young woman had to die to make that possible.

When 18-year-old Natalee Holloway disappeared while on vacation in Aruba in late May 2005, her parents zeroed in on 17-year-old Joran van der Sloot. He was the last person seen with Natalee and he kept changing his story.

Dutch authorities obviously shared their suspicion, arresting Joran twice—but never charging him with her murder. Hope for closure in the case died from a combination of investigative error, an island desire to minimize the crime for the sake of tourism and the hostility generated by Natalee’s parents who made inadvertent missteps as they were caught up in an alien justice system. It appeared that, short of the miraculous discovery of a body, with compelling, intact forensic evidence, there would never be any justice for Natalee Holloway.

For five years, he’s tormented Natalee’s parents through titillating interviews with bloggers and members of the media. Most recently, he accepted a $25,000 down payment in two installments toward the $250,000 he requested from Beth Holloway. In return, he said he’d argued with Natalee and threw her on the ground. Her head hit a rock and she died. He also said that his father—who conveniently died in February—helped him to bury her body in the foundation of a house. A week later, he sent an email saying that he lied.

Along with many others, I believed that it was only a matter of time before Joran was accused of another act of violence against a woman. His obvious narcissism and clear disdain for Natalee’s grieving family made that a foregone conclusion. We could only hope that, this time, it would not be fatal.

Stephany Flores Ramirez (below right) encountered Joran in a casino where they were both gambling. She won a $10,000 pot using some money fronted by Joran. They went to his room to divide up the winnings. According to Joran, she was on his laptop and accessed an article about Natalee Holloway. He said that was a gross and intolerable invasion of his privacy.  "I didn't want to do it," he said.  "The girl intruded in my life."

A civilized person, feeling such an affront, would ask the other person to leave the room. Instead, Joran elbowed her in the face hard enough to knock her unconscious and slammed her into the wall with sufficient force to cause a brain hemorrhage and then strangled her to death with her shirt. Some reports indicate that also he stabbed his victim repeatedly.  Stephany died on May 30, 2010—exactly five years to the day of Natalee’s demise. 

Joran confessed to this murder but his defense attorneys are now saying the confession was coerced and not admissible in a court of law. I imagine Joran is now entertaining fantasies of getting away with this homicide, too.

However, he is facing an entirely differently situation this time. When he ended Natalee’s life, he was on his home island of Aruba. Natalee was just another foreign woman vacationing there. Now, Joran is the foreigner and Stephanie is the native of Peru. I think that factor in this murder will count heavily against Joran’s evasion of justice in this case.

The court of public opinion in Peru seems outraged by Joran’s crime. According to The Associated Press, even holy men gathered outside the courthouse to condemn him. “Outside, seven Indian shamans in brightly colored ponchos repeatedly stabbed a cloth doll representing van der Sloot in a "spiritual punishment" ritual. ‘We're punishing him so that all the forces of evil are purged,’ one shouted.”

However, I am still troubled by the puny sentence. The maximum he could receive for murder in Peru is 35 years. Even if he served the entire sentence behind bars, I think Joran van der Sloot will still be a danger to women when he is 57 years old. To make matters worse, Peru traditionally gives a shorter sentence to those who confess to their crime.

It’s hard to know what to hope happens. Do you want Joran’s confession to be heard in the courtroom, thus nearly guaranteeing that he would receive a sentence shorter than thirty-five years? Or do you hope his lawyers succeed in having the confession thrown out and look to the prosecutors to present a strong enough case for conviction?

I tend to think that either way, the courts will not be very forgiving of the foreigner who killed a native citizen, of a man who is believed to have killed another woman in a fit of rage.

We have to count on Peru to take care of business—to finish the job that Aruba could not. If they, too, fail and Joran gets away with another murder, I have no doubt that he will kill again.

Read More

Where is Baby Beth?

by Kathryn Casey

These are the days of social networking, and like many of you, I’m on Facebook and Twitter. Because of what I do, I’ve befriended causes involving victims’ rights, law enforcement, crime, and pages devoted to helping the search for missing persons. Now I knew there were a lot of folks unaccounted for across not just the U.S. but the world, but seeing their names and photos, the desperate pleas of their families, touched me deeply. So much so that I decided to do the little I could to help, by focusing attention on some of these cases through posts in the coming months.

Toward that end, for my first such post, I’d like to familiarize you with the story of a little girl named Beth “Betsy” Gill, who disappeared exactly 45 years ago this Sunday.

June 13, 1965, was a bright, sunny Sunday afternoon. Lyndon Baines Johnson was in the White House, and the headlines were filled with articles about the Vietnam War. Picture yourself on Lorimier Street in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, as a two-year-old wanders out from a backyard, swinging a sand bucket. Her older siblings don’t notice at first that the toddler has left. This was a kinder, gentler era, or at least many assumed it was, and the Harry Gill family had been a comfortable presence in the area for generations, surrounded by not just neighbors but close friends. But within minutes, the little girl simply vanished.

When Anola Gill, the children’s mother, drove up a short time later, her sister rushed forward and said, “We can’t find Beth.” Anola collapsed on the ground. By then, police swamped the street, but the child, just 22 pounds, with light brown hair, wasn’t to be found. For the next four days, would-be rescuers searched ravines, abandoned cellars, junked cars, and the shores of the nearby Mississippi River. Dogs traced Beth’s path from the family backyard but stopped cold when they reached the street, as if the girl had been picked up and driven away.

In 1965, Beth’s disappearance was front page news not just in Missouri but across the U.S. police explained to reporters what lengths they’d gone to attempting to find the toddler, all to no avail. Where was Beth Gill? “I’m certain the child was kidnapped by someone who just wanted a little girl,” said the police chief, Irvin E. Beard. His conviction was a reflection of the times, when darker possibilities rarely if ever invaded the thoughts of those who searched for Beth.

Before long, the investigation turned cold. Then, five years after Beth vanished, it seemed that the riddle of her disappearance might be solved. In April 1970, a man named Phillip O’Dell Clark came forward, claiming that he’d hit the child with his car. Because he’d been drinking and didn’t have a driver’s license, Clark said he was afraid to take Beth to a hospital. Instead, he said he'd abandoned Beth's small body in a park, later returning to bury it.

Perhaps that would have been the end of the case, but authorities didn’t believe Clark, a convicted killer who by then was serving a life sentence. The inmate was desperate. He had a hit out on him in prison, and police speculated that Clark grabbed onto the Gill case hoping to get at least temporarily out of prison and back to the safer surroundings of the county jail. Adding to the doubts, some parts of Clark's story made no sense, and he later recanted, saying he had nothing to do with the case. “It was a diversion,” says Martha Gill Hamilton, who was fifteen on the day her baby sister disappeared.

 

The result is that for more than four decades, the Gill family has searched, wished, and waited. “It broke both my parents’ hearts,” says Hamilton. “My dad died in 1970. He grieved and grieved.” Her mother, who is now 82, has never stopped yearning for or searching for Beth. “When Beth first disappeared, I thought we’d find her, she’d turn up,” says Hamilton. “I don’t know how my mother has lived with this all these years.”

How did it affect the eight brothers and sisters? “It’s always been there,” says Hamilton, a real estate agent. “It’s always been in the backs of our minds that somewhere, Beth could be out there.”

What does Hamilton believe happened to her sister? In the days before the disappearance, Irish wayfarers, a gypsy-like crew, stayed in a motel behind the Gill house. What piques Martha’s curiosity is that they left town quickly the day after Beth disappeared. “The police weren’t able to catch up with these people,” she says. “The gypsies used multiple license plates and names, which gives the impression that they were involved in something illegal. I believe they either took Beth to raise or to sell.”

Over the years, three women seeking their real names and families have had their DNA tested to see if they might be Beth Gill. None were. If she’s alive, Beth is now 47 years old, and those are her photos above, as a toddler and (above right)in an age-enhanced portrait from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Hoping that someday her youngest child will resurface, Anola (pictured left with six of her children in 1989) has her DNA on file with CODIS, the Combined DNA Index System maintained by the FBI, to be available for future testing.

This Sunday at 8 p.m., to commemorate the anniversary of Beth's disappearance, much of the Gill family along with supporters plan to gather for a candlelight vigil near the old Mississippi bridge in Cape Girardeau. They'll dream of finding a sister long-lost and call attention to the plight of families of the missing.

Read More

Sex-crimes statutes of limitations: Why?

by Diane Dimond 

Sometimes the most simple-sounding questions spark the most profound discussion.

What’s our purpose on earth?

Why is the sky blue?

Why do we have a statute of limitations on sex crimes?

I mean, really, why give the criminal any break at all? By placing a limit on how far back the prosecutor can go to punish a sexual predator, aren’t we telling countless victims that the justice system doesn’t apply to them?

Experts in the medical and law enforcement fields will tell you the career sex offender has probably committed dozens of attacks over a long period of time before they’re ever caught. An FBI profiler once told me the Bureau stopped a serial molester who was in his 90s. Imagine how many victims he’d left in his wake.

Let’s say a career sex offender – maybe a priest, a teacher or a family member – routinely molests children and tricks them into staying silent for 10 years. (Statutes of limitations vary from state to state.) When the offender is finally brought to trial, the prosecutor is often barred from telling the jury about his past pattern of bad behavior, not even if a dozen others come forward to claim the defendant did the same thing to them. Too bad, the law says, it doesn’t matter anymore.

That’s a horrible thing to tell victims, that what happened to them doesn’t matter, that they can't get justice. 

I know a lot of people who work in the justice system, so I called them to pose the question, “Why is there a statute of limitations on sex crimes?”

Mickey Sherman (right) is a noted Connecticut based defense lawyer. “The system is designed to protect a defendant’s rights. Every person has a right to be notified in a timely manner as to potential criminal charges against them,” he told me. "It’s just not fair for someone to be able to say, ‘Hey, 26 years ago last Tuesday this man raped me!’”

When I contacted Boston attorney Wendy Murphy, known nationally as an adamant victim’s advocate, she offered a much more sinister assessment of the status quo.

“The way these silly rules work should make any decent person cringe, because limitation periods mean a perp who raped 25 children can, as soon as the clock runs out, walk into the middle of main street and brag about his crimes – and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

Many others I contacted didn’t want their names used. Most seemed puzzled when I asked if we could simply do away with the statute of limitations for sex crimes.

A federal prosecutor in New Mexico told me, “that’s what the state legislature wants … (they) determine what S.O.L. will apply to every crime.”

A retired district attorney from California said, “It doesn’t have to be that way … a state legislature could pass a law and change it. Maybe it is time to change some laws.”

I also asked a sex crimes prosecutor, who answered in an exasperated tone of voice, “Why is there a statute of limitation on anything! I guess so the cases don’t linger forever…” And he admitted how tough it is to prove a crime happened years earlier. Details get fuzzy, witnesses move away, evidence can get lost, and defendants have the “right to a speedy trial.”

I came away thinking the real answer as to why we allow this is because that’s the way it has always been done …

That’s not to say that some adjustments haven’t occurred. Some states now allow childhood victims from 30 years to come forward. Some waive the time limitation and start the clock anew if psychiatric treatment has helped a victim recover their memory of abuse, or if DNA evidence from a current attack matches the DNA from a dormant case. Long ago, law enforcement started collecting DNA samples from rape victims, and now forensic matches in current cases are helping past victims find resolution. Finally, they are able to come face to face with the shadowy criminal who stole their dignity.

I like this suggestion by Wendy Murphy (left): “Someone,” she told me, “needs to confront the head of the judiciary committee in (every) state legislature where the time limits are short and ask only one question: “Why do you want a child rapist to EVER stop looking over his shoulder, wondering if the cops have finally caught up with him?”

The truth: there is no constitutional right to stop the clock from running on a crime. The lawmakers in your state have simply failed to act.

There is no statute of limitations for murder or treason, and I would submit sexual assault is just as life-damaging and heinous a crime. Let’s demand we abolish this foolish statute.

Read More