“Duped.” “Devastated.” “Sickened.” That’s how a jury foreperson felt after learning that the amount awarded in a landmark lawsuit over abuse at New Hampshire’s youth detention center could be slashed by nearly 99%.
A jury on Friday awarded $38 million to David Meehan, who alleged that the state’s negligence allowed him to be repeatedly raped, beaten and held in solitary confinement as a teenager at the Youth Development Center. But the attorney general’s office is seeking to reduce the award under a state law that allows claimants against the state to recover a maximum of $475,000 per “incident.”
Several distraught jurors have since contacted Meehan’s attorneys, including one who said the state is misinterpreting the verdict. The lawyers have requested an emergency hearing to address what they characterized as confusion over the verdict form.
No hearing has been scheduled, but here are some things to know about how the dispute unfolded.
THE TRIAL
Meehan, 42, went to police in 2017 and sued the state three years later. Since then, 11 former state workers have been arrested and more than 1,100 other former residents of what is now called the Sununu Youth Services Center have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual and emotional abuse spanning six decades.
Meehan’s lawsuit was the first to go to trial. Over four weeks, his attorneys contended that the state encouraged a culture of abuse marked by pervasive brutality, corruption and a code of silence.
The state portrayed Meehan as a violent child, troublemaking teenager and delusional adult lying to get money. Defense attorneys also said the state was not liable for the conduct of rogue employees and that Meehan waited too long to sue.
THE VERDICT
Jurors unanimously agreed that Meehan filed his lawsuit in a timely fashion, that he was injured at the facility and that the state’s negligence caused his injuries. They awarded him $18 million in compensatory damages and an additional $20 million in enhanced damages after finding the state acted with reckless indifference or abused its power.
Jurors were unaware of the state law that caps damages at $475,000 per incident. When asked on the verdict form how many incidents they found Meehan had proven, they wrote “one.”
WHAT COUNTS AS AN INCIDENT?
That’s where it gets tricky.
In pre-verdict discussions without the jury present, lawyers for the state argued that all of Meehan’s claims arose out of a single incident of alleged negligence. Meehan’s lawyers insisted that each act of physical or sexual abuse be counted as a separate incident, even those that happened simultaneously.
“Merely raping a kid is bad enough, but it’s even worse, and a separate incident, if it also involves hitting him in the head or kicking him in the ribs or other things to get him to comply,” Meehan's attorney David Vicinanzo said.
At one point, the judge considered including a list of the type of abuse alleged on each date on the verdict form and asking jurors to determine whether an injury occurred and whether the state was liable. But the state argued that providing such a list would be prejudicial to Meehan’s side.
Judge Andrew Schulman said he disagreed with both parties and if forced to define “incident,” he would consider all the acts that happened in a given “episode” to be one incident. That put him closer to the plaintiff’s view, but in the end, he said he would leave it up to the state Supreme Court to settle.
“Why go out and define something that there’s a 50% chance of being wrong if it doesn’t need to be defined in the first place?” he said. “They can deal with it, but I don't think I have to.”
Attorney Martha Gaythwaite, representing the state, did not address the issue in her closing statement to jurors. Vicinanzo told the jury that Meehan was raped an estimated 200 times, beaten 200 times and held in unjustified solitary confinement for roughly 100 days.
“I want to emphasize to you that the numbers are very important,” he said.
In his verbal instructions to the jury, Schulman said that rather than asking jurors to list “incident by incident” decisions, he asked for “just the number of incidents for which you find liability based on timely claims.” The verdict form itself defined incident as a “(a) single episode during which the plaintiff was injured; (b) for which injuries the jury has found DHHS liable in response to previous questions; (c) on claims the jury found to be timely claims in response to question 1.”
In response to that question, the jury wrote “one.”
BUT WHAT DID THEY MEAN?
One juror explained it like this: “We wrote on our verdict form that there was 1 incident/injury, being complex PTSD, from the result of 100+ injuries (Sexual, Physical, emotional abuse),” the juror wrote in an email to Meehan’s attorneys. “We were never informed of a cap being placed per incident of abuse and that is wrong how the question was worded to us.
“The state is making their own interpretation of the ruling that we made, and that is not right for them to assume our position,” the juror wrote. “David should be entitled to what we awarded him, which was $38 million.”
In separate emails to the attorneys, the jury foreperson described a sleepless night of crying after learning about the cap.
“We had no idea,” the jury foreperson wrote. “Had we known that the settlement amount was to be on a per incident basis, I assure you, our outcome would have reflected it. I pray that Mr. Meehan realizes this and is made as whole as he can possibly be within a proper amount of time.”
