A Brief History of Utah Legislative and Judicial Assists to Child Rapists
How a four year civil statute of limitations on child rape came to be in Utah, and came to
The State of Utah was gripped in the 1980s by what has since been dubbed the Satanic Panic, an epidemic of sensational allegations against prominent Latter Day Saints detailing their involvement with ritualized sexual abuse. The victims detailed being raped in meetinghouses, Masonic temples, LDS temples, and named prominent LDS figures as their abusers. With the aid of a skeptical press corps, and the backlash generated by a nascent public relations machine typified by the False Memory Foundation, the so-called panic receded into a distant memory. Victims were said to have conjured up their memories of abuse under the lead of psychologists and counselors who deployed hypnosis to implant false memories of abuse.
The public went on about its business, inured to allegations of ritualized child rape by the sheer mass of allegations and the sheer mass of backlash by a media that seemed hell-bent on discrediting victims. This culminated in the Utah Legislature’s 1992 enactment of a four year statute of limitations for civil suits against victims of child sex crimes. If the victim did not sue within four years of majority (18 years of age) they were barred from seeking civil redress.
Rep. Ken Ivory attempted to remedy this with his reform, which extended that statute of limitations to 35 years of the victim’s 18th birthday, or three years of the effective date of the legislation, whichever was longer. The multitude of child victims in Utah suddenly had a chance to bring their cases before a civil court. The Utah Supreme Court struck down the reform in Mitchell v. Roberts, stating that the perpetrators of child sexual abuse have a vested right to rely on statutes of limitations as a defense against civil claims from their victims.
In laymen’s terms, as long as you’re competent enough to obliterate your victim’s memory for four years beyond their 18th birthday, due process under the Utah Constitution gives you a substantive right to elude civil consequences for raping and brutalizing children. If you manage to intimidate or cow that victim for four years after their 18th birthday, you obtain a substantive right to evade consequences for your actions in civil court.
The absurdity is obvious: there is no version of due process, either in Utah or at the federal level, that encompasses a right for child rapists to assert immunity against civil claims for rape. No framer of any due process clause would make such a bare argument to enable those who rape and brutalize children to evade culpability as part of their “rights.” The Utah Supreme Court held that due process functioned as a restriction on legislative power, stating that “[t]he legislature “could enact general laws for the future, including the laws for acquisition and use of property, but [it] could not assume the ‘judicial’ power of deciding individual cases.”
By retroactively establishing a different statute of limitations, the Utah Legislature was in effect assuming powers judicial in nature. To wit, the Utah Supreme Court analogized the 2016 reforms to the 1897 case In re Handley’s Estate, which e adjudicated the Utah Legislature’s 1896 statute allowing polygamist children to relitigate a final judgment that allowed the children of the father’s legal marriage to take inheritance from his estate, while excluding the children of his polygamous marriage from any inheritance. In that case, there was a final judgment already in place, and the Legislature’s reform would have allowed the polygamist children to vacate that judgment and relitigate the matter.
In Mitchell, as in virtually every single case that might have been brought under the 2016 law, there were no final judgments in place. Mitchell’s case had not been previously litigated, and no prior judgment would have been overturned. In re Handley did not touch on any statute of limitation whatsoever; in fact, it simply dealt with the Legislature’s attempt to vacate a prior judicial judgment in a specific case. Such a law would have rendered any judgment uncertain going forward, because any time the Legislature disagreed with a court’s judgment, it would pass laws to enable the losing party to refile and vacate the judgment.
The absurdity of applying Handley to Mitchell is obvious to anyone with common sense. The two cases are not analogous to one another in the slightest, other than in the sense that the Utah Legislature attempted to construct a statute with retroactive application. The difference is that a final judgment in a civil lawsuit is supposed to give confidence to the parties that the matter is settled once and for all, so long as it has been constructed within the boundaries of the law and existing judicial precedent. Without such confidence, no one would have any reason to trust a judgment’s finality. There is a vested right to rely on a civil judgment, but there is also a vested right to follow processes to challenge that judgment if the losing party feels that the judgment was made incorrectly with respect to statutes or constitutional processes and requirements.
There is no vested right to rely on time as means of exculpating yourself from accountability for rape. The Utah Legislature did not set aside prior civil judgments or criminal verdicts with its 2016 reforms. It simply gave victims of child sexual abuse 35 years from their 18th birthdays or three years from the effective date of the statute to sue their rapists. No pror civil judgment was set aside, and therefore no incursion was made on judicial power.
The Utah Supreme Court held that State v. Apotex Corp, which did examine a retroactive legislative extension of statute of limitations under the Utah False Claims Act, established the the defense of an expired statute of limitations was a vested right which could not be taken away by legislation that applied retroactively. The reasoning for this was rooted in Ireland v. Mackintosh, which extended the statue of limitations from four to six years on financial instruments such as notes. Again, in business, the importance of certainty cannot be understated. A party to a financial transaction who faces the prospect of uncertainty in the form of a retroactive legislative reform extending their obligation under an expired claim relating to a financial instrument operates without any confidence as to when his obligation actually expires.
In analogizing Apotex and Ireland to Mitchell, the Utah Supreme Court effectively puts sexual assailants on the level of businessman engaged in legal activity to hold that both are entitled to certainty of outcomes, even though the former is engaged in rape and the latter is engaged in a legally valid contract or lending arrangement. The banality is the court’s reasoning is clear, because the two parties are not analogous or equivocable at all.
Moreover, the court in Mitchell neglected to cover the actual facts of Mitchell’s claim and its history, which was originally filed on March 16, 2016, two months before the Legislature passed its reform and made it effective May 10, 2016. Mitchell alleged that she had been subjected to “sexual abuse of a child” which was not a valid cause of action under Utah law, and under the law at the time of the abuse in 1981, Mitchell was not a child and therefore could not have been raped as a child. She was 16 years old, and under Utah law in 1981, she was an adult who could consent to sexual contact with her twenty seven year old alleged assailant.
Mitchell withdrew her Original Complaint, and then refiled it on September 26, 2016, arguing that the Legislature’s May 10, 2016 reform enabled her to do so. The reality was that by filing in March 2016, Mitchell had filed under the old statute, and by alleging an invalid cause of action, she had further sabotaged her own case. Since the case was arguably decided when Mitchell filed and withdrew her complaint prior to the reform’s effective date, it was a final judgment of sorts. Mitchell’s withdrawal was in response to the defendant’s motion to dismiss, which would have been granted under the law.
Instead, the Utah Supreme Court seized on Mitchell’s case to abolish the entirety of Ken Ivory’s reform, on the grounds that it would deprive child rapists of a vested right to avoid future culpability for past rapes, despite the fact that no plaintiff would be able to revive previously adjudicated claims under the reform. Moreover, no plaintiff would be able to claim, as Mitchell did, that they present day standard on age of consent applied retroactively to their sexual dalliances with men over 18 in 1981.
Ken Ivory attempted to amend the Utah Constitution to expressly grant the legislature the power to retroactively abolish statutes of limitations consistent with his 2016 reform. That amendment was unsuccessful in 2022.
Therefore, men like David Lee Hamblin have a vested right to avoid all civil culpability for their decades of rape,torture, and brutalizing of children so long as those children don’t file before their 22nd birthday. The Utah Supreme Court takes the rights of child rapists, especially their due process right to evade civil repercussions for raping children, far more seriously than it takes the mountains of scientific literature showing that it takes far longer than four years for victims to piece themselves together and file a civil suit against their rapists. After all, certainty in child rape is of paramount importance, and how will child rapists be able to rape with confidence without knowing that they have a four year statute of limitations upon which they can rely, thanks to the stalwart constitutionalists of the Utah Supreme Court?
In Utah, there is no criminal statute of limitations on many child sex offenses, which begs the question: who will step forward to establish similar certain for child rapists in criminal courts? Who indeed, will heed the clarion call of the masses and rise to meet this lofty challenge, so that child rapists can rape with confidence and certainty, just like heirs can rely on the final judgment of probate courts to have certainty in their inheritances? Here at IRA, we stand with voices arrayed in a stentorian chorus to say “What about the child rapists?”
What about the child rapists, who operate under uncertainty in Utah’s criminal system, even though the civil system affords them the confidence that they can rely on a four year statute of limitations to shield them from any and all culpability? These are men, human beings, who administer peyote to children in healing circles, pillars of the community like David Lee Hamblin. These are giants of the legal establishment in Utah, men like David O. Leavitt, who extoll the training techniques necessary to condition a child to perform sexually on command, which are quite similar to the techniques you would employ with a dog, like rewards and treats!
By God, what kind of a world are we living in when men cannot rape children without the confidence and certainty that comes from knowing that a trusty statute of limitations confers upon them the right to avoid civil culpability, no matter what the people of Utah and their elected representatives think! Just imagine what would happen if those defenders of liberty and truth over at the Utah Supreme Court were not there to shield child predators from the unimaginable horrors of reforms that would enable survivors of child sexual abuse to sue for 35 years beyond their 18th birthdays, so long as they had no previously sued their abusers! Why, society might come apart.
Well, here at IRA, we are bomb throwing anarchists who just want to watch the world burn, especially if the sexual predators are immolated in the process. And that’s why we’ll be focusing not only on exposing David Lee Hamblin and his alleged accomplices, proving the allegations against them beyond a reasonable doubt, but also advocating for reform in the form of a constitutional amendment to Utah’s Constitution to enable the Legislature to retroactively abolish statutes of limitations on sex crimes. Ideally, there would be no civil statute of limitations on child sex crimes, which is consistent with the criminal laws of Utah, but we’ll take the 35 years Ken Ivory tried to pass into law before the Utah Supreme Court came riding to the rescue of men like David Lee Hamblin.
Given the 1992 implementation of the four year civil statute of limitations after hundreds of LDS men were accused of ritually abusing children, one can guess at what the Legislature’s motivations were in 1992. After all, giving certainty to sexual abusers is what the Utah Legislature was about in 1992, and it’s what the Utah Supreme Court is about today. That has to change, and IRA intends to work to change it with anyone in Utah who’s willing to organize and advocate.
Buckle up, people. We’ve got a war ahead. By the way, the Right Honorable Rep. Ken Ivory has reintroduced the amendment to enable the Legislature to retroactively override the statute of limitations in order to deprive child rapists of certainty in civil cases. Call your elected officials and tell them you want HJR 7 passed. If it passes, you’ll have a chance to vote on it in the next general election in 2024, and it will take effect January 1, 2025.
Another Home Run! With what we've seen and continue to see with the Hamblin investigation, it is no stretch to imagine that these wolves are manipulating the levers of power at the state level in order to protect themselves and their fellow child predators with these types of legislative absurdities.
There really is no other reasonable explanation for protecting non-existent "rights" of child predators over the actual rights of their victims. Thanks GO EL! Hope to see a strong show of resistance against this madness in Manti on Wednesday - either in person or online!
l"Perpetrators of child sexual abuse have a vested right to rely on statutes of limitations as a defense against civil claims from their victims," Ummmm no. They should not have that right. They DEPEND on that defense but no, they should not have a discrete amount of time to be concerned and then....Oh great! 4 years have passed! Yippee! There's no concerns anymore. How pathetic!