Track

Status

Governing provision

The child rule — § 152(C)(1): prosecutions for sexual crimes against children, “specifically rape or forcible sodomy, sodomy, lewd or indecent proposals or acts against children, involving minors in pornography pursuant to Section 886, 888, 1111, 1111.1, 1113, 1114, 1021.2, 1021.3, 1040.12a or 1123 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes, any offense prohibited by Section 843.5 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes, sexual abuse of a vulnerable adult pursuant to Section 843.1 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes, child trafficking pursuant to Section 866 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes, nonconsensual dissemination of private sexual images pursuant to Section 1040.13b of Title 21, and failure to report abuse or neglect pursuant to Section 1-2-101 of Title 10A of the Oklahoma Statutes shall be commenced by the forty-fifth birthday of the alleged victim.” 

It reached backwards when it was enacted — § 152(C)(1), final sentence: “Any offense for which the prosecution is not time-barred upon the effective date of this act shall be retroactively subject to the provisions of this subsection.” The footnoted act is Laws 2024, c. 338, effective 1 November 2024. This is a retroactive extension of the ordinary kind: it lengthens live periods and does not reach prosecutions already barred. 

Adults get twenty years from report — § 152(C)(1), second and third sentences: prosecutions for the same crimes “committed against victims eighteen (18) years of age or older, and sexual abuse of a vulnerable adult pursuant to Section 843.1 of Title 21 of the Oklahoma Statutes, shall be commenced within twenty (20) years after the discovery of the crime. As used in this paragraph, ‘discovery’ means the date that a physical or sexually related crime involving a victim eighteen (18) years of age or older is reported to a law enforcement agency.” 

Three conditional routes to an unlimited period — § 152(C)(2): prosecutions for the crimes in paragraph 1 “may be commenced at any time after the commission of the offense if: a. physical evidence is collected and preserved that is capable of being tested to obtain a profile from deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and b. probable cause as to the identity of the offender is subsequently established through the use of a DNA profile using evidence listed in subparagraph a of this paragraph, or c. the accused person has provided a confession or admission related to the crime.” 

Two evidential restrictions unusual in this dataset — § 152(C)(3): “No prosecution under this subsection shall be based upon the memory of the victim that has been recovered through psychotherapy unless there is some evidence independent of such repressed memory.” § 152(C)(4): a person who knowingly and wilfully makes a false claim under the subsection, or one the person knows lacks factual foundation, may be reported to local law enforcement and on conviction is guilty of a felony. 

The residual — § 152(H): “In all other cases a prosecution for a public offense must be commenced within three (3) years after its commission.” There is no general no-limitation provision in § 152 for homicide or any other offense; the section is a list of periods.

Okla. Stat. tit. 22 — Oklahoma Legislature, official complete title (see the note below about two printed versions of § 152)

Against the perpetrator, the forty-fifth birthday — § 95(A)(6): “An action based on intentional conduct brought by any person for recovery of damages for injury suffered as a result of childhood sexual abuse incidents or exploitation as defined by Section 1-1-105 of Title 10A of the Oklahoma Statutes or incest against the actual perpetrator shall be commenced by the forty-fifth birthday of the alleged victim.” 

AGAINST AN INSTITUTION, TWO YEARS — § 95(A)(6), second sentence: “If the person committing the act of sexual abuse against a child was employed by an institution, agency, firm, business, corporation or other public or private legal entity that owed a duty of care to the victim, or the accused and the child were engaged in some activity over which the legal entity had some degree of responsibility or control, the action must be brought against such employer or legal entity within two (2) years; provided, that the time limit for commencement of an action pursuant to this paragraph is tolled for a child until the child reaches the age of eighteen (18) years.” Read with the tolling proviso, the deadline against an institution is the survivor’s twentieth birthday. 

Death of the perpetrator ends it unless there was a conviction — § 95(A)(6): “No action may be brought against the alleged perpetrator or the estate of the alleged perpetrator after the death of such alleged perpetrator, unless the perpetrator was convicted of a crime of sexual abuse involving the claimant.” 

An evidential threshold written into the limitation section — § 95(A)(6): “An action pursuant to this paragraph must be based upon objective verifiable evidence in order for the victim to recover damages for injuries suffered by reason of such sexual abuse, exploitation, or incest.” 

One helpful provision — § 95(A)(6), final clause: “The victim need not establish which act in a series of continuing sexual abuse incidents, exploitation incidents, or incest caused the injury complained of.” 

Note the opening words: the paragraph applies to “an action based on intentional conduct”. A negligence claim against a school, church or employer — negligent hiring, supervision or retention — is not an action based on intentional conduct and does not appear to fall within paragraph 6 at all. It would run instead on the two-year residual for injury to the rights of another in § 95(A)(3), which carries no special tolling for childhood abuse. 

The single status conceals the most restrictive institutional rule in this dataset. Forty-five against the perpetrator is generous; two years from the survivor’s eighteenth birthday against the institution — age twenty in practice — is the shortest institutional deadline in any jurisdiction reviewed, and shorter than several states’ deadlines against perpetrators. Since most childhood sexual abuse litigation is against institutions, the practical Oklahoma deadline is twenty, not forty-five.

Okla. Stat. tit. 12 — Oklahoma Legislature, official complete title (§ 95 begins at printed page 55) 

Okla. Stat. tit. 12 § 95 — free full text of the section alone

Section 95(A)(6) sets periods running forward from the abuse, tolled to eighteen, and says nothing about claims already barred. The 2017 amendments (Laws 2017, c. 221 and c. 378) rewrote the paragraph and did not add a reach-back. 

The criminal side did reach back, and the contrast is instructive. Section 152(C)(1) provides expressly that “Any offense for which the prosecution is not time-barred upon the effective date of this act shall be retroactively subject to the provisions of this subsection.” The Oklahoma legislature has therefore used retroactive language in this field when it meant to — on the criminal track, in 2024 — and has not used it on the civil track. 

No Oklahoma appellate decision on the constitutionality of retroactive revival was located, and none is asserted. Because no civil window has ever been enacted, the question that produced Thompson v. Killary, Mitchell v. Roberts, Aurora Public Schools v. A.S., Dupuis, Ball, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Washington v. Doe and McKinney v. Goins has not arisen here. 

The tracker records the revival entry as “none” and points the revival field at the civil source document, which is the ordinary handling for a state with no revival provision. That is right, with the qualification that the absence was confirmed by reading § 95 in full rather than by inference — see the coverage note about the source document.

Okla. Stat. tit. 12 § 95 — free full text of the section alone