On December 30, 2015, legendary actor and comedian Bill Cosby was arraigned in the Philadelphia suburb of Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, on charges of sexual assault. This follows years of accusations from nearly sixty women - a number that continues to grow - of drugging and raping them.
There is a distinct legal reason that charges were filed when they were against Cosby in this case, and why Cosby has not been charged concerning the swaths of other victims he allegedly assaulted. That reason is the statute of limitations. By way of explanation, this statute provides that a potential defendant cannot face criminal charges after a given period of time. The statute of limitations in sexual assault cases in Pennsylvania is twelve years. The alleged assault for which Cosby was charged took place in January 2004, so come January 2016, the Montgomery County District Attorney would have been legally barred from prosecuting Cosby. The statute of limitations has already expired as concerns the other survivors.
Rape victims often face aftereffects that are excruciating. Survivors sometimes tragically blame themselves and feel shame. They might not know where to turn for help. They may not have family and/or friends on whom to lean for support. Some cultures, incredibly, assign fault to the attacked, not the attacker. A survivor might additionally consider the grueling process of prosecuting her/his attacker, which entails facing the rapist in court and relaying - and therefore reliving - what happened during the course of the attack repeatedly, and conclude that seeking justice is not worth the additional trauma.
There is no statute of limitations on murder, and that is as it should be. If you kill, and then somehow evade capture for any amount of time, you will face charges for that crime regardless of how much time has elapsed since said crime was committed. Rape is a monstrous crime, arguably as egregious as murder; rape victimizes in the most intimate way possible. The challenges sexual assault survivors face subsequent to the crime are gut-wrenching enough without facing a deadline. 34 states currently have statutes of limitations, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime. While Pennsylvania's is twelve years, in some states, such as Connecticut, it is as little as five years.
Those who have survived rape should not have to be saddled with the compounded injustice of the inability to pursue legal remedies. Survivors of sexual assault face lifelong challenges resultant of their attack and attacker(s); we as a society should not make recovery yet more difficult by imposing a deadline to seek justice. It is time to eliminate the statute of limitations for cases of sexual assault nationally once and for all.
