The judge presiding over the groundbreaking trial on New Hampshire’s youth detention center has declined to dismiss the $38 million verdict. According to the judge, the leadership of the facility either had knowledge of the pervasive physical and sexual abuse and chose not to act, or simply neglected to seek the truth.
A jury ruled earlier this month in favor of David Meehan, who said he was frequently raped, beaten, and confined in solitary confinement at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s. The attorney general’s office wants to dramatically lower the reward. While that question is still unresolved, the state also urged Judge Andrew Schulman to overturn the verdict and rule in its favor.
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State attorneys filed a motion on Monday, accusing Meehan of waiting too long to sue and failing to prove that the state’s conduct resulted in abuse. Schulman refused the motion in less than 24 hours, stating that Meehan’s claims were timely under an exception to the statute of limitations and that Meehan had established “beyond doubt” that the state violated its duty of care in terms of staff training, supervision, and discipline.
According to Schulman, a jury may easily have determined that the facility’s leadership “was, at best, willfully blind to entrenched and endemic customs and practices” such as regular sexual and physical assaults and “constant emotional abuse of residents.”
He said, “Maybe there is more to the story, but the trial record proved liability for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty to a geometric certainty.”
Meehan, 42, reported to the police in 2017 and sued the state three years later. Since then, the state has arrested 11 former employees, and more than 1,100 former residents of what is now known as the Sununu Youth Services Center have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual, and emotional abuse over six decades. Earlier this month, the court dismissed charges against Frank Davis, a former employee, due to his 82-year-old incapacity to stand trial.
Meehan’s claim was the first to proceed to trial. His attorneys argued for four weeks that the state fostered an abusive atmosphere characterized by widespread brutality, corruption, and a code of silence. The state depicted Meehan as a violent youngster, a troublemaker teenager, and a delusional adult who lied to gain money.
Jurors awarded him $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in aggravated damages, but when asked about the number of occurrences for which the state was accountable, they answered “one.” That prompted the state’s motion to decrease the award under a state law that enables claimants suing the state to recover a maximum of $475,000 per occurrence.
According to Meehan’s lawyers, many letters from concerned jurors suggest that the jury misread that question on the questionnaire form. They submitted a request on Monday, asking Schulman to strike aside only the portion of the verdict where jurors scribbled “one” occurrence, allowing the $38 million to stand. The judge may order a fresh trial based solely on the number of events, or he could give the state the option of agreeing to an increase in the number of incidents, they said.
Last week, Schulman dismissed Meehan’s lawyers’ request to reconvene and poll the jury but said he was open to other options for addressing the disputed judgment. The hearing is slated for June 24.
