State challenges historic $38m jury award in landmark YDC abuse case

NH AG's office said it would cap damages in Meehan case at $475k, citing governmental immunity statute limiting claimants to receive that amount 'per inciden'

The first in a pipeline of over a thousand child abuse cases against the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) ended May 3. Jurors in the case awarded $38 million – the largest personal injury verdict in state history – to David Meehan, who alleged he was repeatedly raped, beaten, and held in solitary confinement as a teenager at the Youth Development Center (YDC) in Manchester in the late 1990s.

Now, the State is seeking to significantly reduce the settlement amount.

Following the verdict, the New Hampshire Attorney General’s office – which is also prosecuting criminal cases related to YDC’s abuse of children going back decades – said it would cap damages in the Meehan case at $475,000, citing a governmental immunity statute limiting claimants to receive that amount “per incident.”

Jurors, who were not told about a cap during the trial, checked a box on the jury form listing one incident of complex PTSD. One juror, according to Meehan’s attorney, Russ Rilee, said the jury’s understanding was based on dozens of PTSD incidents/injuries that Meehan suffered while under State care.

The jury awarded Meehan $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in enhanced damages, which reflect the aggravated circumstances of the injuries suffered.

Rilee said the Court has acknowledged there was juror confusion and that it would like to uphold the will of the jury.

“That’s something the State should want to do, as well,” he said, adding that the jury’s award of $20 million in enhanced damages reflects the “wanton and malicious conduct of the State” that will be proven in each abuse case. “The State should also stop abusing David Meehan. This [cap] is a furtherance of that by not honoring the jury verdict.”

In a statement to the Bar News, the New Hampshire Department of Justice (NH-DOJ), said that applying a cap on damages is “not a choice made by the Department of Justice, but an action required by statute.”

The statute, RSA 541-B, sets limits for financial damages against the State.

“The Department of Justice respects all of the jury’s findings, including its finding that the plaintiff had proved just one incident,” the statement said. “It would be a violation of the right to a jury trial and unfair to the State’s taxpayers to single out one finding for special treatment and to substitute some other factual finding for the jury’s verdict.”

Following the verdict, the NH-DOJ also submitted a motion for judgment on the jury’s verdict, stating Meehan failed to meet the statute of limitations, or to prove that DHHS didn’t meet its fiduciary duty to protect children.

In response to the motion, Judge Andrew Schulman, who oversaw the trial, found Meehan’s claims are “timely by virtue of the discovery rule” and that the State’s liability for the rapes and other abuse of Meehan was proven to a “geometric certainty.”

David Vicinanzo, co-counsel for Meehan, said the State’s behavior, referring to the cap on damages, amounts to accusing his client of lying.

“The judge has made it clear he doesn’t believe Meehan lied but what the State is saying by seeking to cap the award at $475,000 is that he lied about hundreds of incidents of abuse in his testimony,” Vicinanzo says. “The Court found ‘beyond doubt’ that the State breached its fiduciary duty to the kids in its care in the 1990s. We will prove in subsequent trials that the State’s conduct was ‘wanton, malicious, and oppressive’ in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and post-2000s, as well.”

Meehan, 42, reported the abuse in 2017 to police and sued the State in 2020. He was at the detention center from December 1995 to January 1999.

Since 2020, 11 former state workers have been arrested, and up to 1,500 former residents of the YDC in Manchester have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, according to Rilee.

“There are as many as 1,500 cases and new clients are calling every day,” he says.

Judge offers 5 options to resolve ‘good faith misunderstanding’

Judge Schulman signaled some support for the jury’s decision to award Meehan $38 million in a May 22 order addressing the $475,000 cap. In the order, Schulman provided various options for reaching an agreement between Meehan’s attorneys and the State.

“The cognitive dissonance between a $38 million verdict and the finding of a ‘single incident’ of actionable abuse cannot stand,” Schulman wrote in the order. “In an age of limited attention spans, each juror paid close attention to the evidence for a month.”

In his order Schulman acknowledges the Court should have provided a more detailed instruction on the definition of what an “incident” means and refers to the jurors as “heroes.”

The order lays out five ways to handle the situation from the least favorable option to the “least incorrect option.” The least favorable option, Schulman said, would involve recalling the jury, which he called a “poor and likely unsustainable use of discretion.” Option two – the “second least favorable” option – would involve taking the jurors’ testimony about their “subjective understandings of the court’s instructions,” which Schulman said could lead to jurors upending verdicts, “based on little more than articulable ‘buyer’s remorse.’”

Schulman added: “There is no suggestion that the jury intentionally disregarded any of the Court’s instructions. All that has been alleged is a good faith misunderstanding as to the meaning of a term in the instructions, i.e., the word ‘incident.’”

The third option – which Schulman says was “conclusively against the weight of the evidence” – would be to grant the State’s motion to enter a single incident judgment of $475,000 instead of the $38 million awarded by the jury.

“An overly clever logician might say that the jury could have found that plaintiff proved one instance of abuse, disbelieved his testimony regarding all of the other instances, and awarded $38 million for the single instance,” Schulman said in the order. “But this would be sophistry rather than true logic.”

The order points out the State did not challenge the plaintiff’s testimony with respect to any of the instances of sexual assault or physical assault except for a suggestion that Meehan’s injuries leading to hospitalization could have resulted from playing football.

Option four, Schulman said, would be a new trial, which he said would be “extremely burdensome to the parties, potentially harmful to the plaintiff, and dilatory with respect to reaching a final resolution of both this individual case and all of the consolidated cases.”

The fifth and “least incorrect option,” Schulman said, would serve as an alternative to a new trial and be “akin to additur,” where a judge is allowed to add damages in cases where inadequate damages are awarded. In this case, the additur would apply to the number of “single incidents” found by the jury. If this option were taken, the State would need to accept that number.

The biggest problem with ordering “additur of incidents,” Schulman said, “aside from the fact that there may not be such a thing,” is that the court has no way of knowing precisely which “incidents” supported the jury’s verdict.

The lowest reasonable number of incidents – based on Meehan’s testimony, which covered multiple incidents of sexual and other physical assault over various periods of time – stands at 155. In his order, Schulman proposes a judgment that would include 103 incidents based on abuse incidents supported by evidence, a reduction of 25 percent in the State’s favor.

Governmental immunity

State statute RSA 541-B provides a degree of governmental immunity and is also referred to by a number of different names, including sovereign immunity, official immunity, and qualified immunity. The statute states, “all claims arising out of any single incident against any agency for damages in tort actions shall be limited to an award not to exceed $475,000 per claimant.”

Attorney Michael Lewis said the State’s attempt to cap damages on the $38 million Meehan settlement may not be factually or legally defensible. Lewis cited a 2018 amendment passed by the state legislature expanding the right for individuals to seek judicial relief, thus challenging the governmental immunity statute.

“That theory [immunity] has been subject to critique,” Lewis said, referring to various New Hampshire Supreme Court cases, including State v. Brousseau, a 1983 decision addressing the existence of sovereign immunity in four cases involving mentally ill, intellectually disabled, and physically disabled patients who allegedly were injured while institutionalized at civil mental health facilities operated by the State.

Lewis said he doesn’t believe the State’s request for a cap in the Meehan case would stand up to an equal protection challenge and Vicinanzo agrees.

“Any cap in this case amounts to a violation of my client’s right to equal protection,” Vicinanzo says. “The State takes a huge risk in pursing this because they could lose the cap altogether.”

Vicinanzo says that by awarding Meehan $20 million in enhanced damages, the jury recognized the State’s behavior was oppressive.

“Now, the State is quibbling about the amount instead of examining its behavior,” he says. “They are supposed to be moral exemplars to the community but instead of thinking about it that way they’re trying to find a technical way to weasel out.”

The greater message, Vicinanzo adds, is “What does the State learn from this?”

Attorneys say apology could help to validate abuse for clients

Rilee, who runs a small firm with his wife, says he has developed a specialty in child abuse litigation cases over the years and adds that he believed Meehan when he came to him seeking criminal prosecution against the State.

“After hiring me, I started digging in and discovered there was more to it,” Rilee says. “Here we are, six years later, and we have the largest scandal in state history and one of the largest in the US involving children.”

Vicinanzo, a trial lawyer for Nixon Peabody who has worked on several cases involving child sexual abuse and domestic violence, praises Rilee’s commitment to the YDC cases.

“Rilee and his wife were the only people David had,” says Vicinanzo, who became co-counsel with Rilee in the YDC cases several years ago. “Taking on the State is always a hard job, especially if you have multiple clients. Russ had the wherewithal to say yes to these clients coming forward despite minimal resources and not knowing how he would handle them.”

Rilee and Vicinanzo both say an apology from the State could have the benefit of validating the abuse their clients allege happened while under State care.

“Our clients have been asking Governor Sununu for an apology for several years,” Vicinanzo says. “The pope goes around the world apologizing everywhere. He’s the face of the institution. There’s no reason the governor shouldn’t do the same.”

A hearing to discuss the cap on damages in the case will be held June 24 at 2 pm in Rockingham Superior Court.