Major Update on Past Gallatin County Sex Crime Investigations

Shortly after being elected Gallatin County Attorney, Audrey Cromwell said she found boxes of cases that had NEVER been prosecuted. These boxes contained cases involving sex crimes, sexual assaults, and sex crimes against children. There were more than 100 of them going back to 2002.

Cromwell pledged to give these cases a second look, and she joined us on the radio Wednesday morning to give us an update on that effort. I took notes during our chat and here's what stood out to me:

-22% of those cases are now moving forward for prosecution.

-charges have already been filed in some of these cases

-some cases are 10-15 years old, with some of the cases falling outside of the statute of limitations

Gallatin Co Atty Cromwell: The task force got those cases back to me in August, and out of the 113 cases we determined that 43 of them we were not able to pursue based on the statute of limitations- which is about 40%.  And of the remaining cases, I met personally with every victim- it was about 40 victims- to discuss whether or not they wanted to pursue their case. I mean, some of these cases were 10-15 years old. Those were excruciating meetings, you know letting people know- people who have been victimized already- that the justice system had let them down, and they were further victimized by that. Was really, really challenging. So out of all of those cases, we have moved forward with 22%. The rest of the cases the victims either did not want to move forward, or we could not locate them since it's been too long.

Here's the full audio of our chat with Gallatin County Attorney Audrey Cromwell. It's in the 2nd half of the below podcast audio: