Rape victims urge lawmakers to revise Massachusetts law

Two survivors who have seen firsthand how advances in forensic science are solving old rape cases are calling on lawmakers to update Massachusetts law and remove the statute of limitations on rape when DNA is present. The two women were raped in 1989 while working at a Framingham retail store by a man posing as a customer. The victims underwent a sexual assault exam and a DNA profile was created from the evidence, but the case was closed. In 2021, the victims asked investigators to reopen their case and use forensic genetic genealogy to generate new leads. That led the Middlesex District Attorney to announce in May that the suspect had been identified through DNA analysis: Stephen Paul Gale. However, the statute of limitations for prosecuting rape runs out 15 years after the crime. “The last thing that should prevent my justice and the justice of other victims is a clock that has run out,” one Framingham rape survivor said in an interview. Gegen was criminally charged, but only because he lived out of state, which under Massachusetts law stops the clock on prosecutions. In other cases, survivors have been denied justice. The Suffolk County District Attorney recently had to drop two charges of aggravated rape against accused serial rapist Ivan Cheung because the statute of limitations had expired. In those cases, he had been accused of raping two women, one in 2005 and another in 2006. In the 2005 case, investigators said the victim was raped and then stabbed, requiring over 100 stabs. The following year, a woman ran screaming into traffic on Route 9 in Wellesley and told police she had been raped. Two years later, the Boston Police Department’s crime lab identified the same male DNA in both rape kits, but thanks to a new police initiative to investigate unsolved rape cases, investigators didn’t know whose DNA it was until 2022. By then, the statute of limitations had expired: 2020 for the first case and 2021 for the second. In October, prosecutors agreed to drop those charges. Cheung still faces charges for allegedly raping underage girls, crimes that have different statutes of limitations. He has denied all charges. “This makes me angry,” one of the Framingham rape survivors told 5 Investigates. “It sends the message that if enough time has passed, they may get away with it,” a second survivor said. But not everyone agrees. Shira Diner, president of the Massachusetts Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said it’s important to keep the statute of limitations. “Statutes of limitations exist because the farther you get from alleged criminal conduct, the harder it is to prepare a defense to these charges. Witnesses are no longer there, memories fade, and physical evidence disappears,” Diner said in a statement. “This law will create situations where investigating and defending allegations will be extremely difficult. This is not how our adversarial system is designed to work.” Thirty-five states have exceptions to the time limit for rape charges when DNA evidence is present. Boston Police Chief Michael Cox supports the law. He said in a statement that his multidisciplinary team, focused on reinvestigating unsolved rape cases and funded by a grant from the federal Bureau of Justice Assistance’s Sexual Assault Kit Initiative (SAKI), has identified several suspected Boston-area serial rapists and brought some sense of justice to more than 30 survivors. “One obstacle to that ultimate justice is the current 15-year statute of limitations for the crime of rape in the Commonwealth. As it currently stands, if a victim was sexually assaulted before 2009, our team cannot bring them justice through criminal prosecution, regardless of the threat to public safety posed by the perpetrator,” Cox explained. This bill is moving forward, but time is running out. The formal legislative session ends on July 31.