{"id":29442,"date":"2024-02-01T06:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-02-01T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/should-churches-and-others-be-held-accountable-for-past-sex-abuse-colorado-voters-may-decide\/"},"modified":"2024-02-01T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-02-01T13:00:00","slug":"should-churches-and-others-be-held-accountable-for-past-sex-abuse-colorado-voters-may-decide","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/should-churches-and-others-be-held-accountable-for-past-sex-abuse-colorado-voters-may-decide\/","title":{"rendered":"Should churches and others be held accountable for past sex abuse? Colorado voters may decide"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Child
Child sexual abuse survivor Randy Kady of Loveland speaks during a press conference at the Colorado State Capitol in support of the Child Sexual Abuse Accountability Amendment. (Hart Van Denburg\/CPR News)<\/span>Hart Van Denburg\/CPR News<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

If it\u2019s eventually passed this November, the amendment would open the door for lawsuits that go back years or decades against organizations from churches to the Boy Scouts of America. Currently, those kinds of lawsuits can only go back a few years.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou will not be forgotten. The state of Colorado is not going to forget you. And we\u2019re going to pass this measure to make sure that there is accountability assigned to the harm that was caused,\u201d said Sen. Rhonda Fields, a Democrat, flanked by survivors of sex abuse at a Capitol press conference Tuesday morning.<\/p>\n

State lawmakers have already tried to expand survivors\u2019 legal powers. A law passed in 2021 similarly allowed retroactive lawsuits for survivors of childhood sexual abuse \u2013 but it was struck down by the Colorado Supreme Court this year.<\/p>\n

The court found the earlier law exceeded the legislature\u2019s constitutional power because it applied retroactively to past events. The only way around that defeat may be to change the state constitution itself \u2013 which is what the lawmakers and advocates are now trying to do.<\/p>\n

Randy Kady, 57, stood at Tuesday\u2019s press conference alongside a photograph of him as a young boy. Around the time the photo was taken in the early 1970s, he was being preyed upon at Village East Elementary School in Aurora, he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want you to take a good look at me,\u201d he told the audience.\u00a0\u201cI\u2019m here to do what I couldn\u2019t do when I was being molested by my first-grade teacher \u2013 to speak out.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kady and his parents had always been open with each other about what happened, he said. But the full details of the situation \u2013 including the teacher\u2019s alleged abuse of more than 30 other boys \u2013 only came into focus after Kady\u2019s mother\u2019s death, when he found newspaper clippings in her belongings.<\/p>\n

\u201cTo realize that she had saved all this information \u2013 at the time, I was like, \u2018Why would she do this?\u2019\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cBut [now] I understand that she wanted me to have an understanding of what was going on around me in the world and how it was handled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kady now believes that school officials covered up the molestation, allowing the teacher to resign for \u201cpersonal reasons.\u201d And he says the proposed constitutional amendment could allow him and others to seek justice.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople need to heal, and that\u2019s what this amendment will do,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Organizations such as the Colorado Catholic Conference have warned that retroactive lawsuits could expose them to unsustainable financial costs, saying that they are already taking action to address the past. Settlements and judgments in individual cases can easily run into the millions \u2013 and others have grown much larger, including the Boy Scouts of America\u2019s multibillion dollar settlement with more than 80,000 plaintiffs.<\/p>\n

In Colorado, the Catholic Church has paid more than $6 million to survivors under an agreement with the state\u2019s attorney general. But survivors and advocates say that\u2019s not enough, and they want to help survivors from organizations far beyond the church\u2019s walls.<\/p>\n

The proposed amendment is starting out at the legislature. If it wins approval from supermajorities in the House and Senate, it can appear on the November 2024 ballot. Alternatively, if the legislature doesn\u2019t pass the measure, then advocates would instead have to gather tens of thousands of signatures from across the state to put the question to voters \u2013 a very costly endeavor.<\/p>\n

If it does appear on the ballot, the amendment would need to win \u2018yes\u2019 votes from at least 55% of voters to take effect. And even then, one more thing would be left to do: In 2025, the legislature would have to pass another law to actually allow for the survivor\u2019s retroactive lawsuits.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have to amend the constitution or else there\u2019s no chance that we could ever come back and pass the kind of laws that could protect these kids,\u201d said Sen. Jessie Danielson, a Democratic co-sponsor.<\/p>\n

The measure is being co-sponsored by Danielson, Fields, Rep. Monica Duran, and Rep. Mike Weissman. All are Democrats, but they are expecting strong Republican support.<\/p>\n

The amendment follows other changes meant to increase accountability. Colorado no longer has civil or criminal statutes of limitations for sex abuse against children. But those changes did not apply to many people already living with trauma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

sexual abuse survivor Randy Kady of Loveland speaks during a press conference at the Colorado State Capitol in support of the Child Sexual Abuse Accountability Amendment. (Hart Van Denburg\/CPR News)Hart Van Denburg\/CPR News If it\u2019s eventually passed this November, the amendment would open the door for lawsuits that go back years or decades against […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":29443,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[120,28,407,524],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-29442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-colorado","tag-headlines","tag-religion-and-belief","tag-sexual-assault"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29443"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29442"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=29442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}