By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH.org
Do years of official negligence that resulted in the 200 rapes, hundreds of beatings, and numerous instances of torture of one child count as a “single incident” under New Hampshire law?
That’s the question New Hampshire Supreme Court justices are pondering as they work toward a ruling in sex abuse survivor David Meehan’s appeal. The Court heard oral arguments in which the Associate Justices Patrick Donovan, Melissa Countway and Bryan Gould issued an order in the case seeking more input.
“[T]he court is considering whether the appropriate interpretation of “single incident” in this case is the individual acts of negligent hiring, training, supervision, and retention and breaches of fiduciary duty by the State that caused the plaintiff’s injuries,” the justices wrote.
The justices want attorneys for Meehan and the state to weigh in with legal arguments on the definition of “single incident” under New Hampshire’s sovereign immunity law. Meehan, the first and only Sununu Youth Services Center, also known as YDC, sex abuse survivor to get a jury trial, is fighting the state’s attempt to knock his $38 million in damages down to $475,000.
New Hampshire’s sovereign immunity law caps the maximum amount of money a single person can collect from the state at $475,000 per incident of misconduct or negligence. The New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office claims the damages cap applies in Meehan’s verdict, even though both the trial judge and jury foreman disagree.
The 2024 civil jury found that the state was completely liable for all of Meehan’s many, many injuries when it answered liability questions at the end of the grueling trial. But, after determining the state should pay Meehan $18 million in damages and another $20 million in enhanced compensatory damages, the jury’s final answer threw a wrench into the process.
The jury wrote that the state is liable for one incident in the final question on the jury form. This allowed Attorney General John Formella to announce, moments after the verdict was made public, that he would seek to knock the jury’s decision down by $37,250,000.
“The cognitive dissonance between a $38 million verdict and the finding of a ‘single incident’ of actionable abuse cannot stand,” Rockingham Superior Court Judge Andrew Schulman, who presided over the trial, wrote in the immediate aftermath.
Complicating the question is the fact the jury foreman reached out to Meehan’s lawyer, Rus Rilee, to express disbelief in Formella’s attempt to overrule the jury. The foreman told Rilee the jurors did not know the sovereign immunity law would apply.
“I’m so sorry. I’m absolutely devastated. We had no idea. 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,” the foreman wrote to Rilee.
But Schulman went on to reluctantly impose the sovereign immunity cap, ruling the law applies even if it results in an unjust outcome.
“The court continues to believe that, if the jury accepted the gist of the plaintiff’s testimony, entering a judgment in the amount of the statutory damages cap will amount to a miscarriage of justice,” Schulman wrote in November of 2024. “The amount of the verdict–$38 million in compensatory and enhanced compensatory damages—cannot be reconciled with the jury’s finding that this liability arises from only a single incident.”
That ruling set up the appeal now under consideration by the Supreme Court. If the Supreme Court justifies that the hundreds of single incidents of horrific abuse visited upon Meehan amount to a single count of state liability, there’s still a question of what to do about the incongruity.
The Supreme Court could rule that Schulman has the legal authority to set aside the final jury answer that states there was just a single incident, which would allow the verdict to stand. There’s also the possibility of sending the case back for a trial in which a new jury would determine how many incidents of abuse occurred.
There’s no timeline for a Supreme Court ruling in the case.
Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald, who created the YDC Task Force in 2019 while he served as Attorney General, is recused from the case, as is Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi. After surviving her own legal saga last year, Hantz Marconi is not taking part in any new cases before the Court. She is expected to retire in February.