Judge weighs settlement of $38 million damages dispute in Youth Center abuse case

The $38 million verdict in a landmark New Hampshire youth detention center abuse trial remains contested nearly four months later, with both sides making final motions to the judge this week.

“It is almost time for the issues to be fully briefed and decided,” Judge Andrew Schulman wrote in an order earlier this month, giving the parties until Wednesday to file their motions and supporting documents.

At issue are the $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in enhanced damages that a jury awarded David Meehan in May after a month-long trial. His allegations of horrific sexual and physical abuse at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s led to a wide-ranging criminal investigation that led to several arrests, and his state prosecution was the first of more than 1,100 who were judged.

The dispute involves part of the verdict form in which jurors found the state liable only for the “incident” of abuse at the Manchester facility, now called the Sununu Youth Services Center. The jury was not told that state law limits claims against the state to $475,000 per “incident,” and some jurors later said they wrote “one” on the verdict form to reflect a single case of post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from more than 100 episodes of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.

In an earlier order, Schulman said imposing the cap, as requested by the state, would be an “impermissible miscarriage of justice.” But he suggested in his Aug. 1 order that the only other option would be to order a new trial, given that the state refused to allow him to adjust the number of incidents.

Meehan’s attorneys, however, asked Schulman to set aside only the portion of the verdict where jurors wrote an incident, allowing the $38 million to stand, or order a new trial focused only on determining the number of incidents.

“The court should not rush to throw out the baby with the bathwater based on a single, isolated error by the jury,” they wrote.

“Forcing a man—whom the jury found to have been seriously harmed by the state’s wanton, malicious, or oppressive conduct—to choose between reliving his nightmare, all over again, in a new and very public trial, or accept 1/80 of the value of the jury. intentional attribution, is a grave injustice that cannot be tolerated in a court of law,” attorneys Rus Rilee and David Vicinanzo wrote.

Attorneys for the state, however, filed a lengthy explanation of why imposing the cap is the only right way to proceed. They said jurors could have found that the state’s negligence caused “a single harmful environment” in which Meehan was injured, or they could have believed his testimony about only one episodic incident.

In making the latter argument, they referred to expert testimony “that the mere fact that the plaintiff may honestly believe that he was serially raped does not mean that he actually was.”

Meehan, 42, went to police in 2017 to report the abuse and sued the state three years later. Since then, 11 former state workers have been arrested, although one has since died and charges against another were dropped after the man, now in his 80s, was found unfit to stand trial.

The first criminal case will be judged on Monday. Victor Malavet, who has pleaded not guilty to 12 counts of aggravated sexual assault, is accused of assaulting a teenage girl in a Concord courthouse in 2001.

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