Full justice eludes Hastert, victims of sexual abuse

On its surface, the sentenc- ing last week of Dennis Hastert, former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to 15 months in prison for illegally structuring bank transactions appears to be just and fair.

On closer examination, however, the crime for which Hastert was sentenced dwarfed the larger crimes he admitted committing but for which statutes of limitations protect him from prosecution.

As it turned out, Hastert, 74, made those secret and illegal bank transfers as hush money to buy silence from one of his victims of sexual abuse in the 1970s when he served as a revered teacher and wrestling and football coach in a suburban Chicago high school.

Thanks in large part to those limiting statutes that prohibited prosecution of Hastert on child sexual-abuse charges, his punishment was softened significantly.

His fall from grace, however, hit hard. How hard? Consider the words of federal district Judge Thomas M. Durkin during Hastert’s sentencing hearing last Wednesday: “The defendant is a serial child molester. Some actions can obliterate a lifetime of good works. Nothing is more stunning than having ‘serial child molester’ and ‘speaker of the House’ in the same sentence.”

With that terse rebuke, the leader of the august U.S. House entered the annals of American history as one of the nation’s most-powerful political figures to serve time in the big house.

Even so, however, on several levels, the adjudication of Hastert’s federal banking violations conjures up the maxim attributed to 19th-century British Prime Minister William E. Gladstone: “Justice delayed is justice denied.”

For Hastert, justice delayed produced justice downsized. Had charges of childhood sexual abuse surfaced before Illinois’ statute of limitations had expired, a more appropriate punishment of many, many years in prison easily could have been meted out. After all, the former Illinois Coach of the Year acknowledged in court his inappropriate sexual contact with several wrestlers, some as young as 14, during his tenure at Yorkville High School from 1965 to 1981.

For Hastert’s victims, justice delayed likely resulted in the long-lasting injustices of mental anguish, torment and self-inflicted shame that adversely affected them well into adulthood.

HIS ‘DARKEST SECRET’

One of Hastert’s wrestlers, Scott Cross, now 53, recounted in court an incident that he said occurred on a locker-room training table when he was 17. “I felt intense pain, shame and guilt. I’ve always felt that what Coach Hastert had done to me was my darkest secret,” he said.

In a broader perspective, justice delayed for the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House in U.S. history stands as an injustice to all Americans as it subverts some of the most-basic tenets of American jurisprudence. Prime among them is the foundation of the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution that mandates the right of defendants – and by extension, of their victims – to a speedy trial.

Had charges of unlawful sexual contact with minors been leveled years ago, many of Hastert’s victims may have more easily and more speedily found a sense of closure.

In this case, as in many others across the nation, statutes of limitations come up short – literally and figuratively. Too often, they work to protect the attacker and not the victim. Such clearly was the case with Hastert’s transgressions.

Fortunately, several state legislatures – including the Ohio General Assembly – have acted in recent years to lengthen such limiting statutes from five and 10 years to 20 and 25 years. Some have moved to eliminate such time limits on child-sex prosecution altogether.

Of course, longer periods to prosecute sexual predators will not in and of themselves mitigate the pain of the abused or motivate some of them to step forward and bring charges.

That’s why it is critical that more victims develop the courage to step forward. Toward that end, greater awareness campaigns in schools and youth groups certainly couldn’t hurt.

Sadly, though, the Hastert case is hardly isolated. Social scientists estimate thousands of sexual predators continue to escape retributive justice for their insidious crimes. If there is any positive value to come from the Hastert travesty, it is the light it shines on the importance of youthful victims mustering up the courage to expose abusers quickly and publicly. In so doing, they’ll also lessen the chances of full and fair justice going terribly wrong.