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

[Nevilledog]

https://ballsandstrikes.org/legal-culture/louisiana-supreme-court-church-abuse-case/

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.

The due process clause—both the one in the U.S. Constitution and an identical version in the Louisiana Constitution—are important limits on the government’s ability to intrude on the rights of ordinary residents. However, the Louisiana Supreme Court’s application of the concept to sexual abusers stretches the idea of property rights to its breaking point, while also ignoring the word from which the Clause derives its name: rights cannot be abridged without due process of law. As the dissent points out, the majority’s treatment of an absolute property right to immunity from civil liability elevates that procedural right above other, fundamental rights—like, say, not being sexually abused by an adult in a position of public trust.

*snip*