Author’s Note: This is a cross post with my other Substack, Investigations in Ritual Abuse, which focuses on a Utah case involving David Lee Hamblin and a sex cult calling itself “The Group” or “The Church of Satan” comprised of Latter Day Saints.
In 1981, 16 year old Terry Mitchell was a witness in felony murder case, the federal prosecutor was Richard Roberts. Robert was prosecuting Joseph Paul Franklin, a white supremacist who murdered two black joggers in Salt Lake City, and Franklin survived the attack. According to Mitchell, Roberts raped her nearly every single day during Franklin’s trial. Roberts’s response to the $25 million lawsuit filed by Mitchell was simple: he’d had “a bad lapse in judgment.”
There was no illegality, Roberts claimed, because he didn’t start the relationship with his 16 year old witness until after the trial and guilty verdict against Franklin. Roberts allegedly told Mitchell that if she went public with her allegations, Franklin’s life sentence would be overturned, and the man who killed two of her friends and injured her would go free.
Mitchell claimed that sexual abuse was a part of her childhood, as she was raped and abused by her mother’s stepfather as a toddler, and she had been raped two months before Franklin attempted to murder her and killed two of her friends in front of her. During the lead up to her testimony, Roberts obtained Mitchell’s life story, including the disclosures of her lifelong sexual abuse, and he allegedly used that information to rape and abuse Mitchell. Mitchell was to testify against the man who raped her two months beforehand shortly after she was shot and her friends were killed.
Roberts didn’t deny having sex with Mitchell at the Shiloh Inn, where he was staying during the trial. He said the sex was consensual. According to Mitchell, after a dinner with Roberts, Roberts claimed he had to stop by his hotel on his way to drop her off at her mothers, and then yelled at her to get out of the car and go to his hotel room. Once he had her in the hotel room, Roberts allegedly told Mitchell “You aren’t going anywhere until I get a taste of you.” He allegedly raped her twice after demanding she perform oral sex on him.
Roberts invoked the statute of limitations as a defense to Mitchell’s claims. That statute of limitations permitted victims of sex crimes four years after their eighteenth birthday to bring a civil claim against their rapist. In 2016, the Utah Legislature, recognizing that such a limited statue of limitations was absurd due to the fact that “it takes decades for children and adults to pull their lives back together and find the strength to face what happened to them,” expanded the statute of limitations to 35 years after the victim’s 18th birthday, or within three years of the effective date of Utah Code 78B-2-308(7).
Roberts moved to dismiss, claiming that he had a vested right to invoke the statute of limitations defense under the old statute of limitations. The federal magistrate, Judge Furse, certified the case to the Utah Supreme Court to determine if the Utah Legislature had the authority to “expressly revive time-barred claims through a statute.” The Utah Supreme Court proceeded to conduct briefing and oral arguments.
The Court ruled that the Utah Legislature was “constitutionally prohibited from retroactively reviving a time-barred claim in a manner depriving a defendant of a vested statute of limitations defense.” The Court then cited two cases in support of their position: Handley’s Estate, which would have allowed the children of a polygamist to reopen probate proceedings after the probate court’s final judgment against them based on the Legislature’s statute which would have allowed the children “to relitigate the dispute and inherit a portion of the father’s estate,” and Ireland v. Mackintosh, where a legislative reform extended the statute of limitations for promissory notes from four years to six years.
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