Concord Monitor – $38 million decision: Judge won’t reconvene jury after controversial verdict in New Hampshire youth center abuse case

The judge who presided over a landmark New Hampshire juvenile detention center abuse trial will not reconvene the jury but says he will consider other options to resolve the controversial $38 million verdict.

David Meehan, who claimed he was repeatedly raped, beaten and held in solitary confinement at the Youth Development Center in the 1990s, was ordered May 3 to pay $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in aggravated damages. But the attorney general’s office is seeking to reduce the award under a state law that allows plaintiffs against the state to recover a maximum of $475,000 per “incident.”

Meehan’s lawyers asked Judge Andrew Schulman on Tuesday to reconvene and question the jury, arguing that several emails they received from distraught jurors showed they had asked a question on the verdict form about the number of incidents for that the state was liable had been misunderstood. But Schulman said Wednesday that dismissing the jury was inappropriate because the jurors faced “intense publicity and criticism of their verdict.”

“We will not receive a new verdict from the same jury,” he wrote in a brief order. “Regardless of what the jury now thinks about their verdict, their testimony is not admissible to change it.”

The jury was unaware of state law that limits damages to $475,000 per incident. When asked on the verdict form how many incidents they thought Meehan had proven, they wrote “one”, but a juror has since told Meehan’s lawyers that they had “one” incident/case of complex PTSD as a result of more than 100 Episodes meant the abuse (physical, sexual and emotional) he suffered as a result of the state’s neglect and abuse of its own power.”

Schulman, who plans to elaborate in more detail, acknowledged that “the finding of ‘an incident’ was inconsistent with the weight of the evidence” and said he would consider motions to vacate the verdict or order a new trial. But he said a better option might be a practice described in a 1985 New Hampshire Supreme Court decision. In this case, the court noted that if a defendant waives a new trial, a trial judge could add compensatory damages to the jury’s initial award.

Meehan, 42, went to police in 2017 and sued the state three years later. Since then, 11 former state employees have been arrested and more than 1,100 other former residents of what is now the Sununu Youth Services Center have filed lawsuits alleging physical, sexual and emotional abuse spanning six decades. Charges against a former worker, Frank Davis, were dropped on Tuesday after the 82-year-old was found to be unfit to stand trial.

Meehan’s lawsuit was the first to go to trial. For four weeks, his lawyers claimed the state was promoting a culture of abuse marked by pervasive brutality, corruption and a code of silence.

The state portrayed Meehan as a violent child, troubled teenager and delusional adult who lies to get money. Defense attorneys also said the state was not liable for the conduct of fraudulent employees and that Meehan waited too long to sue.