On Wednesday Morning, KMOX legal analyst Brad Young of Harrisdale, Fisher and Young joined Total Information AM for his weekly legal roundup. He talked about the statute of limitations for sexual abuse, vaccines and more.
23 states passed laws that suspend the statute of limitations for sexual abuse for victims who were previously prevented from suing over older claims.
“Essentially, these states are saying that the statute of limitations — which is the period in which people must bring lawsuits — has been expanded for things like lawsuits against the Boy Scouts for sexual abuse claims, sexual abuse claims against the Catholic Church. And so those time limitations have been expanded to allow people a longer period of time to file those lawsuits. But on the other hand, both the Boy Scouts and many of the Catholic Archdiocese across the country are also utilizing bankruptcy laws to file for bankruptcy protection to limit the amount of money that's paid out in these claims. So we see these types of claims going in two different directions at the same time.”
Bryan Kohberger was accused of murdering four University of Idaho students in November and was identified through DNA using public genealogy databases.
“The most private piece of information that anyone has is their DNA. And we've seen it work, we're seeing it work right now before our eyes in the Idaho murderers case. We also saw it several years ago, in the California Golden State serial killer case. And what police do is this is completely legal. If they find DNA at the crime scene that does not belong to the victims, then the police create a profile on a commercial DNA site. And by doing that, it allows them to get a potential pool of suspects from which to work. And then they simply work down through all of the genetic testing results from these commercial websites until they can arrive at a potential suspect, who was at the correct time, the correct place and maybe have the correct motive.”
The Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program is taking claims of injuries apparently received from the COVID vaccines.
“If an individual has a negative result from any vaccine — it could have been the flu vaccine, not necessarily just COVID — there is a federal statute called the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparation Act that prevents people from suing manufacturers of vaccines for damages. So there's a pool of money that the government creates. So if someone has a negative reaction to a vaccine, they sue the government to get access to this pool right now. There are approximately 7,500 people who have filed claims for COVID vaccines. But because this is a government agency, it's moving extremely slowly. In fact, in the history of this program, they've only handled about 500 claims. And now they've got 7,500 claims. So it may take a decade or longer to resolve these claims against this fun for folks who have negative reactions to vaccines.”
Hear more from Brad Young on these legal issues on Total Information AM:
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