Carolina Journal
Staff Report
North Carolina’s Supreme Court has upheld the SAFE Child Act’s provision allowing alleged victims of child sexual abuse to file lawsuits years after those suits otherwise would have been barred by the statute of limitations.
Two rulings from the high court Friday allowed SAFE Child Act suits to move forward. But in two other consolidated cases, the court rejected lawsuits in situations when courts had issued final rulings against plaintiffs before the SAFE Child Act took effect.
In McKinney v. Goins, the defendant Gaston County school board had argued that the SAFE Child Act was unconstitutional because of its provision creating a two-year “revival window” for lawsuits that had been barred by the statute of limitations.
The plaintiffs in the case were three former East Gaston High School students alleging abuse by the school wrestling coach in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.
“This case asks whether our state constitution limits the legislature’s authority to revive previously expired tort claims by retroactively altering the applicable statute of limitations. In other words, does the expiration of a tort claim’s statute of limitations create a constitutionally protected vested right?” wrote Chief Justice Paul Newby.
“In 2019, the General Assembly unanimously passed the SAFE Child Act, a law that allowed victims of child sexual abuse to file otherwise time-barred lawsuits during a two-year period from January 2020 to December 2021. Defendant, the Gaston County Board of Education, contends that this revival window unlawfully interfered with constitutionally protected vested rights in violation of our state constitution’s Law of the Land Clause,” Newby added.
Justice Allison Riggs, when she served on the Court of Appeals, wrote an opinion rejecting the Gaston school board’s argument and upholding the SAFE Child Act.
“It reached that conclusion by applying this Court’s longstanding approach to constitutional questions, which begins with a presumption of the act’s constitutionality and then considers ‘the text of the constitution, the historical context in which the people of North Carolina adopted the applicable constitutional provision, and our precedents,’” Newby wrote.
“Because we hold that there is no constitutionally protected vested right in the running of a tort claim’s statute of limitations, we affirm the decision of the Court of Appeals as modified.”
“The text of the relevant constitutional provisions, the historical context in which the people of North Carolina adopted them, and our precedents all confirm that there is no constitutionally protected vested right in the running of a tort claim’s statute of limitations,” Newby concluded.
Riggs did not take part in the Supreme Court’s consideration of McKinney v. Goins. The other six justices agreed to uphold the SAFE Child Act. Yet Riggs’ fellow Democrat, Justice Anita Earls, did not join Newby’s opinion. She wrote a separate concurring opinion “to explain my disagreements with the majority’s reasoning.”
“First and foremost, where we agree: All justices would hold that the political branches may enact remedial legislation that empowers survivors of child sexual abuse to recover for the harm they endured at the hands of their abusers and those that enabled the abuse, through civil litigation of claims that would have otherwise been barred by the statute of limitations,” Earls wrote. “We agree that our previous cases do not create a substantive entitlement to a statute of limitations, nor does the Law of the Land Clause impair the legislature’s ability to alter remedial provisions for the defense of one’s rights.”
“Today’s judgment enables Dustin Michael McKinney, George Jermey McKinney, and James Robert Tate, as well as other plaintiffs who brought revival claims under the SAFE Child Act, to have their day in court, pursuant to a lawful act of the legislature,” Earls added.
“Despite this broad consensus, the majority uses this case to expound ‘the methodology by which we evaluate a constitutional challenge.’ The majority explains that its interpretive method is not to ‘isolate the [constitutional] provision’s meaning at the time of its ratification,’ as previously thought, but rather to trace a constitutional provision back in time to its earliest appearance in our constitutions and key its meaning to that time,” the concurring opinion continued.
“Under the majority’s approach, precedent is inversely important: older cases have more force as to the meaning of our Constitution than newer ones. Same with the constitutions themselves — the context surrounding ratification of North Carolina’s 1971 Constitution ‘lacks much persuasive value’ relative to the 1868 and 1776 constitutions,” Earls argued.
“I disagree strongly with this approach. Not only is it odd as a mode of judicial decision-making in a democracy, since it freezes the meaning of our Constitution in amber according to narrow circumstances in centuries past; but it is also in tension with rule of law principles, by giving greater weight to old caselaw over new, contrary to what is taught in law schools and to what common sense compels,” she added.
“It is important to understand that this approach is a form of extreme originalism that threatens to bring the law and constitutional protections back to that point in this state’s history when slavery was legal and women could not own property or vote,” Earls warned.
In a separate case, Cohane v. The Home Missioners of America, Earls wrote for a unanimous court, with Riggs once again recused from the decision.
“The issue before us is whether section 4.2(b) of the SAFE Child Act, which ‘revives any civil action for child sexual abuse otherwise time-barred’ by the three-year statute of limitations, resuscitates claims against direct abusers as well as those who allegedly enabled the abuse. We hold that it does,” Earls wrote.
“The issue here is whether the General Assembly meant to distinguish between abusers who personally harmed the plaintiff and those organizations, institutions, and parties that employed or supervised the abuser or otherwise condoned, ratified, or facilitated the abuse (enablers),” she added. “Defendants would have us hold not only that the revival provision distinguished between the two types of potential defendants but also that it authorized suits against abusers and not against enablers, in contravention of background tort law principles. We conclude that such a distinction does not follow from the plain text of the provision, nor does it find support in the SAFE Child Act or related statutory provisions read as a whole.”
While some cases based on the SAFE Child Act can proceed, they cannot move forward if a court issued a final ruling against plaintiffs before 2019.
Justice Richard Dietz wrote for the unanimous court in a pair of cases pitting anonymous John Doe plaintiffs against the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte.
“This case presents a different constitutional dilemma,” Dietz wrote. “Plaintiffs in this case are alleged victims of child sexual abuse in the 1970s and 1980s. The SAFE Child Act would have revived plaintiffs’ time-barred claims except for one glaring problem — plaintiffs already brought those claims over a decade ago and courts already entered final judgments dismissing those claims with prejudice because they were time-barred.”
“Plaintiffs contend that the SAFE Child Act overrides those earlier judgments and permits them to bring their newly revived claims,” Dietz added. “[T]he General Assembly does not have the power to set aside a final judgment of the judicial branch.”
“Under well-settled separation of powers principles, ‘the Legislature has no right, directly or indirectly, to annul, in whole or in part, a judgment or decree of a court already rendered’ and ‘every such attempt of legislative action is plainly an invasion of judicial power, and therefore unconstitutional and void.’”
“Had plaintiffs returned to the court that entered the judgments and sought relief based on the SAFE Child Act, that court may have exercised its discretion to set aside the judgments in the interests of justice. But plaintiffs chose instead to file entirely new lawsuits and insist that the General Assembly can override final judgments of the judicial branch because ‘it is not up to the courts to search for some implied constraint on legislative power,’” Dietz wrote.
“The constraint on the legislative branch at issue here is not an implied one; under Article IV of the North Carolina Constitution, the judicial power belongs to the judicial branch alone. We therefore affirm the decisions of the Court of Appeals, which properly concluded that the SAFE Child Act, like any other act of the General Assembly, cannot overturn a final judgment entered by the judicial branch,” Dietz added.
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