A man convicted of sexually assaulting a child by force more than two decades ago was properly tried for the crime because the statute of limitations was on pause during his time living outside of Colorado, the state’s Court of Appeals ruled on Thursday.

“Defendant does not dispute that he was absent from Colorado for more than five years,” wrote Judge Diana Terry for the court. “Therefore, based on section 16-5-401’s 10-year limitations period, as well as its five-year tolling provision for a defendant’s absence from the state, the statute of limitations in defendant’s case did not expire until June 16, 2011, well past the July 1, 2006, deadline established by the General Assembly.”

On June 16, 1996, a strange man entered the bedroom of a four-year-old girl through the window and sexually assaulted her. The child screamed, prompting the man to exit, and the mother called police.

The case went unsolved for nearly two decades, until police discovered that the fingerprints on the child’s window matched those found at a separate burglary scene. They belonged to Joel Market, who was stationed at Fort Carson in Colorado Springs at the time, and had had moved to Texas in 1998.

Upon trial, a jury found Market guilty and he received a 24-year prison sentence.

Market appealed, arguing that the statute of limitations for his offense had expired 10 years after the crime. In 1996, two provisions in law governed the timeline for child sex abuse cases: both of them provided for a 10-year window, but one allowed that a defendant’s absence from Colorado, up to five years, would cause an extension of the statute. The process is known as tolling.

In 2006, the General Assembly eliminated the criminal statute of limitations entirely for sex abuse of children. The removal applied to any offense for which the statute of limitation had not yet expired, meaning that crimes after July 1, 1996 could be prosecuted with no timeline.

The appellate court determined that when the legislature extended the statute of limitations to 10 years in 1982, it intended for the tolling of defendants living out of state to apply to all sex offenses against children. Given the extension, Market’s crime was pushed into the category of cases whose statute of limitations had not expired when the legislature passed the elimination in 2006.

“Given that no statute of limitations ultimately applied to the crimes of which defendant was accused, we determine that he was timely prosecuted in this 2016 case for his 1996 sexual assault on a child by force,” Terry wrote.

The court also rejected Market’s argument that he had not used force against the child, pointing to the victim’s bruising and internal bleeding from the assault as sufficient evidence of force.

The case is People v. Market.