By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
One of the few men to be held accountable in the state’s long-running child sexual abuse scandal, James Woodlock, is set to be sentenced Wednesday on convictions for being an accessory to sexual assault.
A jury found Woodlock guilty in September on the two felony charges, setting up this week’s sentencing hearing. But before Hillsborough Superior Court Judge William Delker renders his decision on possible prison time, survivor David Meehan will have his say.
Meehan became the pivotal figure in the ongoing Sununu Youth Services Center (YDC) story when he first came forward in 2017. Meehan was raped hundreds of times as a child held in state custody, and he is the first among more than 1,000 other survivors to take the state to court.
According to Meehan and other survivors, Woodlock is one of many abusers who brutalized children in state care. This abuse was covered up by supervisors and other employees for decades.
“Woodlock was a willing and consistent participant in this brutality for many years and was part of the ‘code of silence’ which lied about and ‘sanitized’ it to cover it up from the public,” Meehan’s attorneys state in a notice filed this week.
The jury found evidence to convict Woodlock on two counts of serving as a lookout while another YDC staffer sexually assaulted Meehan. The jury did not convict on a third count in another, similar incident.
The relatively few criminal charges brought against Woodlock is another, troubling aspect to the YDC story. According to Meehan’s lawyers, Woodlock is credibly named as a sexual abuser in 70 separate civil lawsuits brought by survivors, yet the criminal investigation focused on a handful of Meehan’s allegations.
Woodlock is one of a few alleged abusers to go to trial, despite hundreds of named abusers in the civil lawsuits who could still be charged under the statute of limitations. The state essentially stopped investigating YDC abuse after indicting 11 men in 2021.
Instead of prosecuting people who abused children, the state’s energies seem to be focused on protecting taxpayer dollars from being used to pay victims like Meehan. A jury awarded Meehan $38 million last year at the end of his civil trial, but New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella insists the state should only pay $475,000 to Meehan. The resulting legal quagmire is currently being pondered by the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
Meehan remains the only YDC survivor to get his case before a civil jury. More than 2,200 other survivors applied for the YDC Settlement Fund before the June 30 deadline, only to have Gov. Kelly Ayotte change the rules on how the Fund operates. Ayotte’s changes strip away the independence of the Claims Administrator and give Formella the ability to veto settlement agreements. So far, Formella has vetoed at least eight agreements.
The Settlement Fund changes are the subject of a pending lawsuit brought by the survivors who accuse the state of pulling a bait and switch.