DOJ-OGR-00003664.pdf

--- Page 1 --- The extracted text is: **Case 1:20-cr-00330-PAE** **Document 206** **Filed 04/16/21** **Page 12 of 22** thus did not decide the issue (and in which Congress' rejection of the retroactivity provision was not discussed), and Nader, in which the court incorrectly excluded legislative history from its Landgraf analysis. If Landgraf is correctly applied, and legislative history is given its proper weight in the analysis, it is clear from Congress' rejection of the retroactivity provision that it did not intend the 2003 Amendment to be retroactive. Counts One through Four are therefore time-barred. **3. The government cannot prevail at step one.** Meanwhile, the government's claim that it should prevail at step one can be easily dispensed with. The government relies on the language in the 2003 Amendment that "[n]o statute of limitations that would otherwise preclude prosecution" of a child sexual offense "shall preclude" prosecution during the life of the victim. 18 U.S.C. § 3283 (2003). While the government argues that this language refers to the pre-amendment version of § 3283, the Second Circuit recognized in Weingarten that "there is a more natural interpretation of that phrase that does not address retroactivity—that Congress intended the language in the 2003 version of § 3283 to clarify that the statute prescribes a statute of limitations for applicable offenses that is different from the default five-year limitations period under federal law." Weingarten, 865 F.3d at 55. See also Miller, 911 F.3d at 644 (suggesting that "otherwise preclude" language "may refer only to preclusion by the five-year federal default statute of limitations"); Nader, 425 F. Supp. 3d at 626 (interpreting same language to "merely 'signal the drafter's intention that the provisions . . . override conflicting provisions of any other section,'" rather than the pre-amendment version of § 3283) (quoting Cisneros v. Alpine Ridge Group, 508 U.S. 10, 18 (1993)). This interpretation is bolstered further by the presence of the same "[n]o statute of limitation[s] that would otherwise preclude" language in the 1990 statute that originally created **7**