Colorado’s Supreme Court on Tuesday denied child sexual abuse victims to file lawsuits from previous assaults that happened over a decade ago.
Colorado’s Child Sexual Abuse Accountability Act, passed in 2022, was meant to allow child victims to bypass the statute of limitations and seek reparations and accountability for their assailant and/or organizations that might have failed to catch and stop any abuse.
The law gave victims a three-year window to sue over abuses dating back to the 1960s.
The bill’s sponsors argued that particularly for children, such abuse often goes unreported at the time it happens.
In the court’s June 20 opinion, Justice Monica M. Márquez acknowledged the reasons why Colorado lawmakers enacted a three-year window to give survivors, whose civil claims for sexual abuse had long passed the legal deadline, a new opportunity to seek compensation for their injuries….