Should the statute of limitations be removed for rape?

Absolutely yes.

Absolutely.

I don’t see why not. And I actually tried to think of a reason. Rape is just too deplorable to excuse. Even if you later cured cancer.

Yes.

I’m not sure I would extend it to forever like murder, but 5 years is way too short.

The law is wrong, and I have strong opinions as to why. It has to do with under-18 rapes.

If we take out the emotional element of rape, there’s the legal element which is very contradictory. In most states, parents or the legal system can charge someone with a sexual offense—statutory rape—if the older individual is over 18 and the younger is under 18, even if the sex was completely consensual. That means, someone can be slapped with a lifetime sentence of “sexual offender” for having consensual sex that was not approved by the parents.

However… to have an unlimited statute of limitations in most states for rape of a minor, the younger individual has to be under 10–14 (depending on the state) at the time of the rape. In Florida, the individual has to be under 12. I think that’s far too young.

Suppose a girl is 15— she only has 5 years, in many states, to report a rape, but with her parents permission, she can consent to sex with a 21, 25, or 45 year old. The state sees a 15 year old as capable of making a sexual determination, as long as her parents consent. Now, suppose she was raped, but her parents disagreed that it was a rape, or if she has zero support, she has 5 years to figure out how to step up and report it.

I’m sure there are young people who are strong enough to report a rape within 5 years of it occurring, but I wasn’t one of them. I was brutally raped when I was 17 by a 21 year old. I only had 5 years to report it, but without any support or validation from people around me, I needed to grow up, become more knowledgeable and confident before I felt capable of reporting and pressing charges. I was in my 30’s when that confidence finally came around. I can’t imagine the same thing happening to a 13 or 14 year old and them not having any recourse when they became adults.

I do not think the statute of limitations should be unlimited for adults, but I do think 5 years is far too short. I also think that anyone under 18 should have an unlimited statute of limitations.

Yes. No statute of limitations on rape, and statutory rape reform along the lines of the so-called “Romeo and Juliet” laws. Healing can take a long time for some people, and no one should feel like their recovery is a race against the clock or that they have to choose between getting better in a healthy way and prosecuting their attacker (if they so choose). It’s not like the deck is stacked against rapists in court anyway, so they don’t need the added protection of a statute of limitations.

The only limitations are in the intellect of those responsible for imposing such pathetically light sentencing tariffs.

I somewhat agree with @Linguaphile, for the reasons given – specifically for crimes that happened before age 18. But mostly I disagree.

But assume that if a rape is reported, it is because the police (and the victim) want to arrest and prosecute the rapist. Otherwise, why do it?

The real problem is prosecution. Rape is largely (not always) a he-said/she-said type of crime. Sometimes there is physical evidence, sometimes not. Sometimes there is a police report, sometimes not.

Take the example of a woman who reports a rape when she is 32 years old that allegedly took place ten years earlier. After ten years, her memory can cloud – anyone’s can in ten years – and with no physical evidence collected at the time (which in this case would be none, since she is reporting it ten years later), where’s the basis for prosecution?

Don’t get me wrong – I am in no way condoning or defending rape.

What I am saying is that the ability to prosecute a case successfully goes down drastically the longer the time from the incident. Is any district attorney going to take a stale rape case- one that happened 10–15 years earlier – without unbelievably solid evidence? I can’t see it.

There are other reasons why I think that a statute of limitations for rape ought to stay in place, but the one above is the big one.

I want to add that no matter what the statute is, if the rape happens before the age of 18 I don’t think they should start counting until the 18th birthday. For instance if the rape was at age 15 and the statute is 10 years then the statute doesn’t start counting from 15, but 18 and the person has until 28.

I wonder how this would work. Don’t you usually need some sort of physical evidence to prosecute a rape? I would think that if there was physical evidence it would be gathered by the police or a physician. You would think that would start the legal system in motion right away.

I am totally ignorant about this.

And yeah, Bill Cosby needs to sit down before a jury.

@johnpowell I think even without evidence people coming forward can help put a rapist away. Like if a woman is raped and does the whole rape kit thing, but the case is weak in other ways. Maybe things are being twisted to make it all sound consensual. Then the authorities are able to locate women from the past who were also raped by the same man with similar stories, but just never came forward. They strengthen the case.

This is a story about a woman who was brutally raped, but she never went to the police. Several years later, the police called her, because the rapist came to the police station and confessed. It turned out he did it just after the statute of limitations, so there was absolutely nothing they could do. People suspect that he turned himself in on purpose, just to be a jerk. So he’s an admitted rapist, and there’s nothing anyone can do.

(I was friends with the rapist in this story in High School, btw. Yay for friends!)

@JLeslie – that’s wishful thinking. They strengthen the case if there is a case to begin with.

No, and further, I don’t think there should be a statute of limitations for any provable crime, period.

If I rape someone, isn’t that going to stay with them for the rest of their life. Enough said.

I am confounded as to why there is a statue of limitations on the rape when the actual designation of sex offender once convicted is life long. It seems counter intuitive to me. There is not statue of limitations on murder and there is usually given life without parole to a murderer. That follows for me logically. I do understand that rape can be hard to prove and with each passing year it can get harder. And then there is a lot to be said for false accusations and character assassination. I am not aware of the statistics but I do remember reading that it was the most misreported crime.

But then again looking at it from the angle of a person who was sexually molested as a minor and raped as an 18 year old who was far too scared and influenced by my parents not reporting the first crime just removing contact to individual,... I would have to say that it took me a long time to heal from it and even once I thought I was over it, I really wasn’t. Once I had a healthy view of things I didn’t feel compelled to go back and report the individuals. The only thing that would make me want to report it is if it could help other victim;s in some tangible way. But at this point it would be a he said she said event.

I am not sure that I approve of the life long designation as a sex offender for certain crimes either. Especially for ones that involve statutory rape. The minor could be very close to consenting age but the parents are not consenting. The minor could also lie believably about age if it is close. And those are just a couple examples I have seen played out.

Ok, I’ll bite. Perhaps the statute of limitations should be extended in certain circumstances, but in general, our judicial system is designed to protect the innocent charged with a crime. It’s a core American principle that we bend over backwards to prevent the innocent from being convicted (though it still happens far too often). Human memory is terrible. We think it’s great, but it’s been proven time and again to be shitty/unreliable, especially after a period of time has passed. As time passes it becomes impossible for the defendant to have a fair trial. I know there have been cases where women have sworn on the stand and been absolutely convinced that the defendant was their rapist, only to have DNA exonerate them after serving years and years behind bars.

Here’s a relevant article. In 2005, Virginia re-tested every sample collected between 1973 and 1988, apparently only 214 were of sufficient condition to test the DNA. Of those, 79 were exonerated by the evidence. That demonstrates pretty conclusively how terrible eye-witness testimony is. In cases where the victim knew the rapist, things are different since you’re not going to misidentify a suspect in a lineup, and those are the much more common form of rape as I understand it.

I think the system needs to be improved to support rape victims, to collect DNA evidence immediately and to give them all the tools possible to get support and see their rapists put in prison where they belong. That said, I don’t think we should remove the statue of limitations. It exists for a reason.

@elbanditoroso The issue of physical evidence is irrelevant. If there’s no evidence, then there will be no prosecution regardless of whether or not there is a statute of limitations and regardless of whether or not it has expired. The question only comes up when there is sufficient evidence for a prosecution after the statute of limitations has expired.

@gorillapaws Given the incredibly low rate at which rape gets reported and prosecuted (even when there is evidence), a statute of limitations does basically nothing to protect the innocent. All it does is protect the guilty. False reports are very rare, and false accusations are even rarer (since most reports don’t lead to accusations or prosecutions).

Also, I’m not sure why you think that article is relevant. Convicting black men on virtually no evidence isn’t exactly a new thing in Virginia, and it’s certainly not restricted to the crime of rape (of all the exonerated people whose identities have been revealed, only one was white). You’re also looking at cases that were prosecuted at a time when DNA testing was very unsophisticated, whereas removing the statute of limitations would only affect future cases (statutes of limitations cannot be changed retroactively).

And as for statutes of limitations existing for a reason, that reason is tradition. They come from the common law tradition of medieval England, and the statute of limitations on rape comes from a time when it was seen as a crime against a man’s property. But maybe that’s a tradition you’re interested in upholding?

@JeSuisRickSpringfield I’m not talking about false accusations (i.e. no rape ever occurred), I’m talking about mistaken identification of a suspect (i.e. a rape did occur but the victim incorrectly identified the rapist). The article I linked is relevant to point out how fallible the human memory is. It gets much worse over time. Furthermore physical evidence degrades, witnesses that could testify for the defense can die as time goes on, etc. Time makes a fair trial difficult. When you convict the wrong person of a crime two horrible things happen. You ruin an innocent person’s life and the real rapist is never caught and can continue to harm others. Our system of justice is designed to bend over backwards to prevent the innocent from being convicted—rightly so, and it still fails to do so far too often.

Removing the statue of limitations would certainly increase the number of innocents wrongly convicted for crimes, and I can’t get behind that. I do think rape isn’t reported enough, and in many cases women are too scared to pursue justice. That’s the element that needs to change. If we can get good evidence and convict rapists immediately based on airtight forensics you can guarantee that the bad guys are getting put away. I’m not sure how anything I’ve written can be construed to mean that I think women should be property. I’d love to hear you explain that logic.

@gorillapaws I do agree with you about “mistaken identification” and that may be true in stranger rape cases. Unfortunately, less than 5–20% (varying statistical results) are stranger-rapes. Marital rape, actually, is far, FAR more common than stranger rape and almost never reported. Female-on-male rape also occurs more often than stranger rapes.

Most of the time the victim or people around her/him know who the assailant is—so for the statute of limitations to expire on stranger rapes… maybe that would make sense because these are also among the easiest to report and prove.

The most difficult rapes to report and prove are marital rapes, and these happen far, far, FAR more often than we can imagine and tends to have the shortest statute of limitation. I’m not sure what I think of that…

@gorillapaws The case you cited was tried within the current statute of limitations, so it’s not like the statute of limitations helped at all there. That’s what makes it so odd for you to hold up a statute of limitations as if it would prevent cases like that. You seem to think there would be more cases like that if the statute of limitations were removed. But just as time might make a fair trial difficult, it also makes a trial less likely and harder to win. Rape is underreported and underprosecuted. It is therefore very unlikely that any case would be tried past the current statute of limitations unless the evidence was good and strong. And even then, it is unlikely to result in a conviction.

The only thing the statute of limitations does, then, is deny certain people justice. There is simply no evidence you can produce that suggests “removing the statue of limitations would certainly increase the number of innocents wrongly convicted for crimes.” This is especially true given @linguaphile‘s point about mistaken identity only being a real issue in the case of stranger rape, which is vastly in the minority when it comes to rape cases.

You have also completely misunderstood my last statement. Since I apparently need to make it absolutely clear, the statement you were responding to was made ironically. You said that the statute of limitations is in place for a reason. But whatever you might think the reason is, the actual reason is tradition—and specifically, a tradition that viewed women as property. Now, I strongly doubt that you think women should be treated as property. So that’s why it is odd for you to support a law that is based on that tradition.

@JeSuisRickSpringfield I think you’re misunderstanding my argument. I used those examples to show how fallible the human memory is (even within the statue of limitations). Add time and memory becomes even worse (much worse).

In addition to the huge problem of memory being much worse, evidence becomes degraded/destroyed. Witnesses that could testify become unavailable. In my opinion, it’s impossible to have a fair trial under these circumstances. I’m thinking back to my own life, and say (completely hypothetically) a woman erroneously accused me today of raping her back when I was in high school (e.g. maybe she went to a hypnotherapist who recovered a false memory). For arguments sake, let’s say I was working at the time and there was surveillance video showing me working at the time I was supposedly raping the victim. In high school, I worked at Circuit City’s parts distribution warehouse. That company no longer exists and any surveillance footage that could have been used to exonerate me is almost certainly destroyed. So now I have to defend myself against a charge that I’m being accused of happening over a decade ago with very little ability to prove my innocence. The trial would come down to a he-said/she-said situation. I think situations like this would lead to a much higher percent of false convictions.

While the statue of limitations may be in place in the US legal system due to traditions extending from the British legal system, The reason they STILL exist is for ACTUAL good reasons (not simply because of tradition). We have evolved away from many of the bad legal traditions we inherited from Britain (e.g. women couldn’t serve on a jury), and kept the ones that make sense (habeas corpus). People don’t say the reason we still have Habeas Corpus is simply because of tradition. We have Habeas Corpus because it’s a good idea. Just as a statue of limitations is a good idea.

“Rape is underreported and underprosecuted. It is therefore very unlikely that any case would be tried past the current statute of limitations unless the evidence was good and strong. And even then, it is unlikely to result in a conviction.”

I disagree with this line of reasoning. Prosecutors make bad decisions all of the time. Assuming they won’t abuse the removal of the statue of limitations to further their careers or political agendas is a terrible and dangerous assumption.

As I understand the problem of rape, the biggest crisis is victims not filing charges, either because of fear, embarrassment, intimidation, concerns that the justice system won’t provide adequate protection, etc. By far the best way to address the problems with rape in the US is to solve those issues so we can have timely conviction and harsh punishment for rapists before they can continue harming other people. It will put rapists away quickly so they can’t rape others and it will minimize the chance for false convictions, allowing the innocent an opportunity for a fair trial and the guilty little room for escaping justice.

@gorillapaws I understand that human memory is fallible. What you have consistently misunderstood is the fact that for that very reason prosecution is much less likely as time goes by unless there is other strong evidence available. That’s why I don’t share your concern. Yes, memory is limited. But if memory is the only evidence available, there likely won’t be any prosecution in the first place past the current statute of limitations. Therefore, there likely will not be any risk of the problem you are so bafflingly concerned with.

I get that you don’t buy this line of reasoning, but none of your concerns are actually about the statute of limitations. They are about the standards of evidence to justify a prosecution. But we have other, separate laws about that. That’s why we don’t see murder being prosecuted decades after the fact very often despite the fact that there is no statute of limitations on murder. In fact, I can’t understand how being concerned with the statute of limitations on rape but being utterly unconcerned with the statute of limitations on murder is anything but rape apologism. “Hey, murderers should be tracked down to the ends of the earth. But rape? Give the poor guys a break!”

Sure, timely prosecution would be best. But evidence can be collected early while still allowing victims the time to recover fully before filing charges. That’s what you seem to keep missing: it is entirely possible to get the ducks in a row and then wait for a time when it won’t further harm the victim to prosecute. But you don’t seem to care about the victim’s wellbeing. You are trying to make them choose between healing and justice—which is precisely the choice that I don’t think they should have to make.

Perhaps this has already been said above, but if evidence is adequately retained past a statute of limitations, why deny a rape victim justice just because of an apparently arbitrary time limit?

Although some evidence, such a witness’s memory, may deteriorate over time, the requisite standard of proof remains the same.

@Brian1946 – because once you do that, then the law is meaningless. Who decides what is ‘adequately retained’?

For a law to be be followed, it must be clear. And something like “well sometimes it means this but if there is evidence it might mean something else” is not a law that can be followed.

@elbanditoroso

Are you saying that once an SoL is lifted, the law against rape becomes meaningless? If that’s the point of your assertion, do you also assert that applies to laws against murder?

Otherwise, the direct counterpoint to my assertion that rape victims should not be denied justice because of an arbitrary time limit, is that they should be denied justice once the SoL has expired.

Investigative agencies, including forensic labs, and ultimately the courts decide whether evidence is still adequate for prosecution and proof of guilt.

@Brian1946 – I mean that the police and prosecution (and public) have to know what the law is. Consistently and fairly. Laws that are changed at the whim of the prosecutor are not just.

Why do you think we have Miranda warnings, laws about arrest warrants, and so on? It’s so everyone knows what the rules are. Cops don’t like Miranda warnings, but the rules are understood.

I’m surprised that a conservative such as yourself wouldn’t be in favor of clear and consistent laws.

The current CA SoL for non-aggravated rape is 6 years, and there is NO SoL for aggravated rape. If there was going to be any change to that, law enforcement and criminal defense attorneys should be duly informed, and it’s their professional duty to be informed. If I know what the law is, I’m sure they do too.

As far as I know, it’s usually state legislatures that change laws regarding rape, not prosecutors. I don’t know how much whimsy was involved in imposing the CA SoL, but I don’t think there should be one. If prosecutors were to address a legislature in an effort to secure greater access to justice for rape victims, I wouldn’t consider it to be whimsical.

Advocating for rape victims doesn’t make me conservative. I’m sure Elizabeth Warren and many women’s rights groups would agree with me, and I wouldn’t consider them to be conservative, at least in that regard.

There would be nothing inherently unclear or inconsistent in lifting an SoL. Those aspects would mostly be determined by the language and application of the law.

@JeSuisRickSpringfield ”What you have consistently misunderstood is the fact that for that very reason prosecution is much LESS LIKELY as time goes by unless there is other strong evidence available. …But if memory is the only evidence available, there LIKELY won’t be any prosecution in the first place past the current statute of limitations. Therefore, there LIKELY will not be any risk of the problem you are so bafflingly concerned with.”

I have emphasized the “likely”s from above. You are making assumptions and putting faith in prosecutors that they will behave ethically. I have read about many cases of prosecutorial abuses. Many prosecutors have political ambitions and yet you seem to have no problem putting an immense amount of faith in all of them to do always the right thing (“I’m John Doe, and I’m pro-women! Look at my record, as a prosecutor I’ve locked up more rapists than any other in the state! Vote for me for State Attorney General”). You’re right that on the macro level abuses probably won’t be rampant (and many prosecutors won’t attempt to try very old rape cases), however this wouldn’t preclude thousands of abuses at the micro level—not enough to shift national statistics, but enough to destroy a significant number of innocent lives. I don’t trust all prosecutors to never abuse that authority/discretion. I suspect this will result in poor, black men getting charged in these situations disproportionate to rich, white men.

”…but none of your concerns are actually about the statute of limitations.”

This is false. MY MAIN CONCERN WITH REMOVING THE STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS IS THAT IT MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO PROVIDE AN EFFECTIVE DEFENSE as evidence degrades or is destroyed, witnesses become unavailable (or unreliable), etc. In my previous post I gave the hypothetical example of surveillance footage that could be used to establish an airtight alibi being destroyed (or did you not read any of that?). This isn’t about the standard of evidence, it’s about our system of justice bending over backwards to prevent the innocent from being wrongly convicted. Long periods of time can make it difficult/impossible for the defense to make their case.

”…I can’t understand how being concerned with the statute of limitations on rape but being utterly unconcerned with the statute of limitations on murder is anything but rape apologism.”

Are you accusing me of being a rape apologist?

”Sure, timely prosecution would be best. But evidence can be collected early while still allowing victims the time to recover fully before filing charges. That’s what you seem to keep missing: it is entirely possible to get the ducks in a row and then wait for a time when it won’t further harm the victim to prosecute. But you don’t seem to care about the victim’s wellbeing. You are trying to make them choose between healing and justice—which is precisely the choice that I don’t think they should have to make.”

Here’s why that’s a terrible fucking idea. If there is a rapist running around and you collect the evidence to convict, but don’t prosecute him for 10+ years (or however long the statute of limitations happens to be) how many other people are going to be harmed in the meantime? Of course I care about the victim’s wellbeing, but I also care for the wellbeing of the (dozens of?) other potential victims out there. I think the obligation to prosecute to protect the community trumps the emotional/psychological pain of the trial. I’m sorry it has to be that way, but it’s infinitely better to prosecute quickly and lock the offender up, protect the community than wait around for 30 years of therapy and emotional healing with a rapist running around before starting a trial. A conviction in that situation would do very little to help the community if the guy is 70 and impotent.