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CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The $38 million verdict in a landmark trial over abuse at a New Hampshire youth correctional facility stays in dispute nearly 4 months later. Both sides filed their final motions with the judge this week.
“It is almost time to fully present and decide the facts,” Judge Andrew Schulman wrote in an order earlier this month, giving the parties until Wednesday to submit their motions and supporting documents.
At issue is the $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in aggravated damages that a jury awarded David Meehan in May after a month-long trial. His allegations of horrific sexual and physical abuse on the Youth Development Center within the Nineties sparked a significant criminal investigation that resulted in several arrests, and his lawsuit looking for to carry the state accountable was the primary of greater than 1,100 to go to trial.
The dispute centers on a portion of the decision by which the jury found the state chargeable for just one “incident” of abuse on the Manchester facility, now called the Sununu Youth Services Center. Jurors weren’t told that under the law, damages against the state are capped at $475,000 per “incident.” Some jurors later said they wrote “one” on the decision to point a single case of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from greater than 100 episodes of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
In an earlier order, Schulman said the cap requested by the state could be an “unreasonable miscarriage of justice.” But in his Aug. 1 order, he indicated that the one other option could be to order a brand new trial since the state had not allowed him to regulate the variety of incidents.
Meehan's lawyers, nonetheless, asked Schulman to throw out only the a part of the decision by which the jury mentioned one incident, leaving the $38 million award in place, or to order a brand new trial to find out only the variety of incidents.
“The court should not be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater because the jury made a single error,” they wrote.
“To force a man – who the jury found was seriously injured by the wanton, malicious or oppressive conduct of the state – to choose between reliving his nightmare in a new and very public trial or accepting one-eightieth of the compensation the jury intended is a grave injustice that cannot be tolerated in court,” wrote attorneys Rus Rilee and David Vicinanzo.
But the state's lawyers provided an in depth explanation of why imposing a cap is the one right plan of action. They said jurors could have found that the state's negligence created “a single, harmful environment” by which Meehan suffered harm, or they might have believed his testimony about only a single, episodic incident.
In support of their latter argument, they cited the testimony of an authority “according to which the mere fact that the plaintiff sincerely believes that he was raped multiple times does not mean that this was actually the case.”
Meehan, 42, went to police to report the abuse in 2017 and sued the state three years later. Since then, 11 former state employees have been arrested, although one has since died and charges against one other were dropped after the person, now in his early 80s, was declared incompetent to face trial.
The trial in the primary criminal case begins on Monday. Victor Malavet, who has pleaded not guilty to 12 counts of aggravated sexual assault, is accused of attacking a young girl in a jail in Concord in 2001.
image credit : www.boston.com