Montana v. Ronald Dwight Tipton

In Stogner v. California, 539 U.S. 607 (2003), this Court held that a California statute that revived timebarred prosecutions for sex-related child abuse crimes, and that was itself enacted after the limitations period for the alleged offense had expired, violated the Ex Post Facto Clause. Stogner involved a sexual abuse report 25 years after the alleged abuse and was based on recovered memory. This case, by contrast, involves the 1987 rape of an 8-year-old who immediately reported the crime; the suspected rapist’s identity was discovered only after the crime lab entered Ronald Tipton’s DNA profile into CODIS in 2014 as part of a separate criminal case and found that it matched the unsolved rape. The Montana Supreme Court nevertheless held that Stogner barred prosecution of Tipton because the statute of limitations for the 1987 rape had expired before Montana enacted a law allowing prosecutions within one year of a suspect’s DNA identification, even if the limitations period had expired. The questions presented are:

1. Whether this Court should revisit Stogner and clarify that the Ex Post Facto Clause does not bar the revival of a limitations period in cases where DNA evidence identifies the suspect after the statute of limitations has expired.

2. Whether this Court should overrule Stogner because it departed from the exclusive definition of ex post facto laws set forth in Calder v. Bull, 3 U.S. 386 (1798).