RALEIGH, N.C. (Legal Newsline) - A North Carolina YMCA chapter will get another chance to challenge the application of a law extending the statute of limitations for sexual abuse lawsuits after a court of appeals rejected an attempt to put the question before a three-judge panel the legislature created to decide the constitutionality of state laws.
Joseph Cryan and several other men sued the national YMCA organization as well as the Kernersville Family YMCA over abuse they suffered from Michael Todd Pegram when he was employed there. All of the claims were barred by the North Carolina statute of limitations until 2019, when the state legislature amended the law to allow abuse lawsuits to be filed within two years of the criminal conviction of the perpetrator.
Pegram was convicted in 2019 and the plaintiffs sued in February 2020. The YMCA moved to dismiss the case, arguing the 2019 law was unconstitutional as applied to the facts in its case. The plaintiffs moved to have the case sent to a three-judge panel in the Wake County Superior Court that the legislature established in 2014 to hear constitutional challenges to state laws.
The trial judge agreed, over the objections of the defendant that it was mounting an “as-applied” challenge not subject to the three-judge panel, as opposed to a facial challenge questioning the fundamental constitutionality of the law. In an order transferring the case, the judge said the plaintiff, not the defendant, was making a facial challenge to the law.
The defendants filed an interlocutory appeal with the North Carolina Court of Appeals, which agreed to hear the case. And in a Nov. 16 decision, the appeals court reversed and remanded the case.
First, the court rejected the defendants’ argument they were entitled to interlocutory appeal because the trial court’s shift to the three-judge panel affected a “substantial right” to venue. The appeals court said the trial judge’s decision was to resolve a question of subject matter jurisdiction, not venue.
The appeals court agreed with the defendants that the trial court erred by deciding the plaintiffs were making a facial constitutional challenge subject to the jurisdiction of the three-judge panel, however. The plaintiffs had only argued the defendants were making a facial challenge, the appeals court majority ruled, sending the case back to the trial court for further action.
Judge Jeffery Carpenter dissented, saying the majority shouldn’t have granted the YMCA’s request for an interlocutory appeal because it will incentivize parties to do the same thing every time there is a constitutional question over state law.
“The precedent that flows from the majority’s opinion will create a dilemma in which any disagreement between the parties as to whether a constitutional challenge is `facial’ or `as applied’ will be decided by this court, rather than by the three-judge panel prescribed by statute,” he wrote. “The majority’s grant incentivizes parties who wish to delay a trial on the merits of a case to petition this Court for a decision as to whether the referral of an issue to the three-judge panel was proper in every instance.”