BILL NUMBER: S490
SPONSOR: FERNANDEZ
 
TITLE OF BILL:
An act to amend the penal law, in relation to including instances of
sexual conduct against a child less than seventeen years of age to
certain sex offenses
 
PURPOSE OR GENERAL IDEA OF BILL:
To permit crimes of sexual conduct against a child in the first and
second degrees and predatory sexual assault against a child to include
all sexual conduct against a child committed prior to the child's seven-
teenth birthday.
 
SUMMARY OF PROVISIONS:
Section 1 amends subdivisions 1 and 2 of section 130.75 of the penal law
(course of sexual conduct against a child in the first degree) to
include all sexual conduct against a child committed prior to the
child's seventeenth birthday.
Section 2 amends subdivisions 1 and 2 of section 130.80 of the penal law
(course of sexual conduct against a child in the second degree) to
include all sexual conduct against a child committed prior to the
child's seventeenth birthday.
Section 3 amends subdivisions 1 and 2 of section 130.96 of the penal law
(predatory sexual assault against a child) to include all sexual conduct
against a child committed prior to the child's seventeenth birthday.
Section 4 sets the effective date.
 
JUSTIFICATION:
Child victims of sexual abuse are often victimized by offenders repeat-
edly over the course of many years throughout adolescence. Prosecutors
routinely find victims' accounts of child sexual assault to be credible,
yet are unable to bring charges because current statute dictates that a
defendant cannot be charged for raping or sexually abusing a child after
the child's eleventh or thirteenth birthday (depending upon which subdi-
vision of the statutes is used) if the child is unable to provide a
narrow time frame for the abuse. As a result, no felony sex charges can
be brought; all that can be charged may be a misdemeanor count of endan-
gering the welfare of a child to cover years of rapes, criminal sexual
acts and other sexual abuse.
This legislation will preclude victims from the emotionally devastating
requirement to recall and testify the exact dates of all sex crimes
committed against them when the acts are so numerous that no one could
reasonably be expected to ascribe specific dates to each one. Second,
prosecutors will no longer have to present judges, defendants and juries
with complicated and cumbersome multi-count indictments involving dozens
or hundreds of charges by allowing a single count of course of sexual
conduct against a child or predatory sexual assault against a child to
be charged to cover all sexual abuse through a victim's seventeenth
birthday.
 
PRIOR LEGISLATIVE HISTORY:
2023-24: S4046 / A8193
2021-22: S406 / A3225
2019-20: S7248 / A9101
 
FISCAL IMPLICATIONS:
None to the state
 
EFFECTIVE DATE:
This act shall take effect immediately