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SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A lawyer defending a convicted bigamist against a child rape count told the Utah Supreme Court that the state waited too long to file charges.
Tom Green may have had sex with one of his wives when she was just 13, but prosecutors charged him with it about a decade too late, John R. Bucher said during oral arguments Wednesday.
Bucher said the statute of limitations for child rape had long expired when Green was charged in April 2000. He was convicted in June 2002.
Tom Green and Linda Kunz consummated their marriage in January 1986, but Bucher said the state also lacked jurisdiction because Green and Kunz had sex in Mexico.
Green, also convicted of four counts of bigamy, is serving a sentence of five years to life at the Utah State Prison.
He has also appealed his bigamy convictions, and Bucher argued on that matter before the court in December 2003. The court has not yet issued a ruling in that case.
Although 14 years had lapsed between the child rape charge and the time the Greens had sex, prosecutor Laura Dupaix of the state attorney general's office said the state had every right to charge him.
She said the four-year statute of limitations was alt ered in 1991 to give the state four years from the time law enforcement learns of the alleged violations to file charges.
Dupaix said Juab County Attorney David Leavitt discovered in 1999 that Kunz was 13 when she married Green as he was investigating Green's bigamy charges.
The statute was written to allow the state to prosecute child sex abuse years after it occurs, since children are often scared and don't come forward with their allegations until they are older.
Bucher countered that two of Kunz's relatives reported the marriage to state officials shortly after the ceremony and again in 1989.
Also in her arguments, Dupaix said Utah law gives the state jurisdiction not only in crimes committed in the state but also in crimes planned in Utah and committed elsewhere -- as long as the crime is illegal both in Utah and in the place it is committed.
She said Green and Kunz's mother, Beth Kunz, conspired to have Green and Linda Kunz married while they were in Utah.
Bucher argued that the betrothal was simply a statement of the pair's intention to marry at a later date and that the decision to marry didn't occur until Green and the Kunzes were in Mexico.
The court has taken the issue under advisement and will issue a ruling sometime in the future.
(Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
