The Kentucky Supreme Court is considering whether a law meant to bolster the rights of child sex abuse victims can be applied retroactively in 2017, the General Assembly passed a law allowing child sex abuse victims to sue their abusers ten years after they turned 18 or ten years after the abusers are convicted.

Then, in 2021, the law was amended, allowing the extension to be applied retroactively to misconduct before 2017.

It also allowed victims to sue non perpetrator third parties.

However, what was not clear was whether the amendment can be applied to cases where the statute of limitations expired.

One of those cases was before the justices last week.

Samantha Callery attempted to sue two Louisville police officers, alleging they knew her father, who was a police lieutenant, was sexually abusing her and failed to report it.

She also sued Louisville Metro.

However, a circuit court ruled the statute of limitations ran out in the case and she could not sue killers, representatives told the justices.

The 2021 amendment was intended to be applied retroactively.

Those on the other side said the claim expired and should not be revived.

And when you look at these cases, this isn't like a car wreck case where someone who waits more than two years to file their claim is doing so just out of sheer delay.

A victim of child sex abuse has to jump through multiple moves psychologically in order to pursue these claims, especially in a case like Samantha Cavallari, where this was her father that was committing this abuse.

So it takes a long time for those individuals, decades even.

And if you look at the Child USA statistics, most of the victims of child sex abuse don't come forward until their fifties and sixties.

The bottom line for us is that the 2021 amendments are not before the court because they were not addressed and they were not addressed to the trial court.

And perhaps most importantly, from all the evidence and everything that we have in front of us today, there's nothing in them to show that they should be applied retroactively.

For this reason, the court should overrule the Court of Appeal decisions in this case.

The representative for Louisville Metro also argued that the city has sovereign immunity in this case and cannot be sued.