New Washington Law Helps Convict Child Molesters, Part 2

Legal observers and victims’ advocates are predicting that the change in the statutes will help in the prosecution and conviction of sexual offenders. In allowing additional victims to testify, evidence of a pattern of abuse over the years can be built and is critical in a prosecution, says Mary Ellen Stone, director of the King County Sexual Assault Resource Center. “Having this other person or people say, ‘This happened to me, too, in the same kind of way,’ can absolutely increase convictions.” Juries can see, ‘Oh, there’s a pattern, he’s done this before.’ It can combat the idea that they can’t convict an 80-year-old guy because now they can see he’s been doing this for the past forty years.”

The Sexual Assault Resource Center, Stone and her staff, worked tirelessly to advocate for the change in Olympia. The issue of admissibility of past sexual offenses was a big part of the center’s legislative agenda.

According to Stone, “It makes a huge difference. Sometimes victims of rape and molestation do not have significant physical evidence of the abuse – perhaps too much time expired before the assault was reported, or the type of assault did not leave much physical evidence. The problem can be magnified in the case of children, who are often ‘groomed’ by the offender for years and subject to nonviolent molestation such as grabbing, touching, or rubbing.”

The current case involves charges of child-rape and child-molestation and asserts that Scherner molested a seven-year-old relative during a family vacation in Bellevue, Washington in 2002. Not surprisingly, Scherner’s defense attorneys did not want to allow the testimony of prior alleged victims during the pretrial hearing phase.