CONCORD, NH — The $38 million verdict in a groundbreaking lawsuit The dispute over abuse at the New Hampshire juvenile detention center is still ongoing nearly four months later, and both sides filed their final motions with the judge this week.
“It is almost time to fully discuss and decide the issues,” Judge Andrew Schulman wrote in an order early this month giving the parties until Wednesday to file their motions and supporting documents.
At issue is the $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in aggravated damages that a jury awarded to David Meehan in May after a months-long trial. His allegations of horrific sexual and physical abuse at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s sparked a wide-ranging criminal investigation that resulted in multiple arrests, and his lawsuit seeking to hold the state accountable was the first of more than 1,100 to go to trial.
The dispute concerns a portion of the verdict in which jurors found the state liable for only one “incident” of abuse at the Manchester facility, now the Sununu Youth Services Center. The jury was not told that state law limits claims against the state to $475,000 per “incident,” and some jurors later said they had written “one” on the verdict to reflect a single case of post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from more than 100 episodes of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
In an earlier ruling, Schulman said imposing a cap, as the state has requested, would be a “unconscionable miscarriage of justice.” But he indicated in his Aug. 1 order that the only other option would be to order a new trial since the state would not allow him to adjust the number of incidents.
However, Meehan’s attorneys have asked Schulman to either set aside only the portion of the verdict in which jurors listed one incident and leave the $38 million award in place, or to order a new trial focused only on determining the number of incidents.
“The court should not be so quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater based on a single and isolated jury error,” they wrote.
“Forcing a man – who the jury finds has been seriously harmed by the reckless, malicious or oppressive conduct of the state – to choose between relive his nightmare“Once again, in a new and very public trial, or accepting 1/80th of the jury’s intended damages is a grave injustice that cannot be tolerated in a court of law,” wrote attorneys Rus Rilee and David Vicinanzo.
However, attorneys for the state filed a lengthy explanation of why imposing the cap is the only appropriate way to proceed. They said jurors could have found that the state’s negligence created “a single harmful environment” in which Meehan was harmed, or they could have believed his testimony only about a single incident.
In making the final argument, they referred to expert testimony “stating that the mere fact that the claimant genuinely believes that he has been serially raped does not mean that this is actually the case.”
Meehan, 42, went to police in 2017 to report the abuse and the state accused three years later. Since then, 11 former government employees have been arrested, though one of them has since died and charges against another were dropped after the man, now in his early 80s, was deemed unfit to stand trial.
The first criminal case goes to trial Monday. Victor Malavet, who has pleaded not guilty to 12 counts of aggravated criminal sexual assault, is accused of assaulting a teenage girl in a Concord home in 2001.