HARRISBURG – Minors have more time to adhere to the particulars of state law when making claims for discrimination, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled.
On Sept. 16, a 4-3 majority of the court decided an 8-year-old boy who was sexually assaulted by three of his fourth-grade classmates at a Philadelphia elementary school didn’t need to have reported his claims within the usual required 180 days to the Pennsylvania Human Rights Commission.
His complaint, filed more than two years later against the Philadelphia School District, was subject to a minority exception. The boy, known in court papers as N.B., was called “faggot,” “gay” and “homo” because he did not conform to norms regarding masculinity, Justice Debra Todd wrote.
He was also beaten, had his glasses broken, told to kill himself and bullied into sexual acts.
Once the complaint was filed, the Philadelphia School District claimed exceptions to the 180-day limit did not apply. The court found the Pennsylvania Human Rights Acts’ equitable tolling provision did not apply to a minor whose parent failed to file a complaint on time.
“We recognize, as noted above, that statutes of limitations, while perhaps arbitrary and harsh, serve salutary purposes, including finality, ending a defendant’s potential liability, and avoiding litigation using stale evidence,” Todd wrote.
“And, we acknowledge that to interpret equitable tolling to include minority tolling would negatively impact these Yet, while not insubstantial, we believe that the hardships which are concomitant with delayed litigation are far outweighed by the benefits of allowing the limitations period in which to file a complaint under the PHRA to be tolled until a child reaches the age of majority.”
The majority of justices disagreed that because the Minority Tolling Statute passed before PHRA, then the legislature would have expressly included its allowance when applying PHRA.
Todd was joined by justices Max Baer, Kevin Dougherty and Sallie Updyke Mundy.
The minority was led in a dissenting opinion by Justice David Wecht and included Chief Justice Thomas Saylor and Justice Christine Donohue.
“Preliminarily, it appears that Nicole B. (Mother) waived the issue of equitable tolling by not adequately preserving it in the trial court,” Wecht wrote.
Wecht wrote that the Legislature is presumed to know that exceptions to limitations periods only apply if expressly provided.
“Having conspicuously excluded from the PHRA an explicit exception for minors, the Legislature presumably understood, and therefore intended, that a litigant’s age would not toll that statute’s limitations period,” Wecht wrote.
“Yet the Majority treats the absence of minority tolling from the PHRA as a factor favoring Mother’s expansive formulation of the equitable tolling doctrine, thus elevating an ordinary fact of life such as age to the level of an ‘extraordinary’ condition.”