Ruling Spurs Confusion in Old Sex Abuse Cases

Jose Antonio Vasquez was arrested and jailed last year after DNA tests showed he had fathered the child of a teenager he allegedly raped 10 years ago. This year, a judge freed him, citing a U.S.Supreme Court decision blocking California’s attempt to revive criminal prosecutions in older sex abuse cases.

Raul Juarez isn’t as lucky. Citing the same high court ruling, a different judge decided that 1988 rape allegations against him would stand.

The two cases illustrate the confusion and uncertainty in California courts since the decision. There is no agreement on the most basic ground rule: how to apply the ruling.

Even though the two defendants faced similar charges for crimes committed a few years apart, two Los Angeles judges made rulings with contradictory outcomes. Their cases were identified in a review of hundreds of cases by prosecutors and defense attorneys since the Supreme Court ruling in June.

After the ruling, authorities predicted hundreds of cases would be dismissed, releasing a potential flood of child molesters into communities that would have no way to track them.

So far, slightly more than 50 inmates have been released from state prisons, including about a dozen convicted of crimes in Los Angeles County, according to the California Department of Corrections.

The most visible cases dismissed so far have been those of Roman Catholic priests accused of sexually assaulting children. Others may involve teachers accused of molesting students, parents accused of abusing their children and coaches accused of victimizing players.

The Supreme Court ruled that California had violated the U.S. Constitution when it passed a law retroactively extending the period for prosecuting those who sexually abused children. The 1994 law gave prosecutors one year after notification of such a crime to file criminal charges, no matter how long ago the incident occurred.

The main issue that attorneys and judges are grappling with now is determining the cut-off date for prosecution, based on the Supreme Court decision.

“It’s not as clear as everybody thinks it is,” said Gigi Gordon, a defense lawyer appointed by the court to review hundreds of cases for indigent inmates.

Defense attorneys argue that all cases alleging crimes that occurred before 1994 -- the date the California law went into effect -- should be thrown out. Prosecutors counter that only cases from before 1988 should be dismissed. Crimes that took place in the six years between 1988 and 1994 should be fair game, prosecutors say, because the statute of limitations had not expired on those crimes before the law was enacted.

Applying the new Supreme Court decision has been especially frustrating for prosecutors, whose job usually is putting criminals behind bars.

“We have to do our job whether we like it or not,” said John K. Spillane, who is overseeing the review of hundreds of the cases for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office.

The legal process doesn’t end when a judge throws out a conviction. DNA samples must be removed from the state database. Names must be stricken from sex offender registries. And court fines and fees assessed at conviction must be refunded.

“All those things have to be undone because they couldn’t happen in the first place,” said Judge David S. Wesley, who presides over the criminal courts in Los Angeles County.

The final tally of cases affected by the Supreme Court ruling is far from complete. In Los Angeles County alone, prosecutors and defense lawyers are reviewing more than 750 cases.

“It’s been a very time-consuming process,” said Michael Goodman, a deputy alternate public defender who works in the appellate division.

It took almost eight weeks just to compile a master list of cases for review, because early computer runs were incomplete. Lawyers are now digging through archives to retrieve dusty files that were closed long ago, and sifting through documents spread around 43 courthouses throughout the county.

The ruling “caught everybody by surprise,” said Dave LaBahn, executive director of the California District Attorney’s Assn. in Sacramento.

Surprisingly, few inmates have inquired about their cases, according to defense attorneys. Victims have urged prosecutors to look for new allegations that fall within permissible time limits and that could prevent a defendant from being released.

“We want them to continue to look for victims,” said Mark Kelegian, legal advisor for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network. “It never happens just once.”

Kelegian pointed to the case of Michael Wempe, a retired Roman Catholic priest who had been charged with sexual abuse in cases dating to the 1970s. The charges were dismissed because of the high court ruling. But Wempe was rearrested last month after a victim read about the dismissals and came forward to allege that Wempe had molested him.

The earlier charges against Wempe involved alleged crimes committed before 1988, and therefore authorities agreed that they had to be dismissed under the court decision. The new charges related to acts allegedly committed later -- between 1990 and 1995.

Many cases involve multiple criminal charges over several years -- with some counts affected by the Supreme Court ruling and others not. Defendants charged in these “hybrid” cases are expected to be retried or re-sentenced, but not released.

The ruling also creates challenging scenarios that reflect the complexity of the criminal justice system. What happens, for example, to the child molester who was charged with committing abuse in the ‘70s and the ‘90s, and confessed to the older charges as prosecutors dismissed the more recent ones? The conviction based on the older incident must be dismissed, but can prosecutors resurrect the more recent charges?

Or, in another scenario, is a defendant entitled to a new trial because jurors heard evidence of sexual abuse charges that are no longer valid?

“There are a lot of unanswered questions,” said Assistant Public Defender Lon Sarnoff, who is monitoring the review for his office. “We have found that many of these slam-dunks are not slam-dunks.”

Even after a case is sorted out to comply with the law, there can be significant tactical questions.

Today, state law requires that defendants in these cases serve at least 85% of their sentences. But older rules allowed parole after half the sentence had been served. The result is that some inmates who face prosecution on new charges if some counts are dismissed may discover that they would serve less time if they remained in prison and served out their original prison terms.

Vasquez, 59, was freed although DNA tests confirmed that he had fathered a child with the girl in 1993, and even though he had admitted to committing lewd acts with the victim, according to prosecutors.

Vasquez had been awaiting trial for more than a year when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert P. O’Neill dismissed all 24 counts against him.

In the other case, Juarez was released from jail in July after retired Judge Randolph Moore dismissed five felony counts against him.

But at the prosecutor’s request, Judge Patricia M. Schnegg last month reinstated two of the counts of forcible rape, which allegedly occurred in 1988 and 1989.

Juarez, 49, is expected to plead no contest to the remaining counts this month, and remain free, prosecutors said.

Both cases appear headed for the state appeals court.