What's Rape Against An Incarcerated Child Worth: NH Supreme Court To Decide

By DAMIEN FISHER, InDepthNH

David Meehan was raped hundreds of times as a child held inside New Hampshire’s juvenile detention system, and now the New Hampshire Supreme Court is being asked to decide how much each of those rapes are worth.

Thursday’s oral arguments before the Court center on the sovereign immunity defense the New Hampshire Attorney General’s Office is trying to use to knock Meehan’s $38 million jury award down to $475,000. Whatever the court decides will likely impact hundreds of other Sununu Youth Services Center civil lawsuits brought by sexual abuse survivors.

The state claims that Meehan’s original jury found the state liable for one incident of mismanaging YDC, and despite the $38 million jury award, therefore the amount of money is capped at $475,000 in damages under state law.

Meehan’s attorney, David Deane, told the justices the state’s attempt to collapse the rapes, beatings, and torture Meehan suffered as a child into one incident of official mismanagement defies the facts presented during the 2024 trial.

“Judge [Andrew] Schulman gave the state every benefit of the doubt and concluded that no reasonable jury could have accepted the gist of the plaintiff’s testimony and awarded $38 million and found less than 116 incidents of abuse,” Deane said.

The state’s move to shield itself with the sovereign immunity law would not only violate Meehan’s rights to justice, but it would fly in the face of past Supreme Court rulings, Deane said.

“This Court has thought that the state cannot be immunized for such willful government misconduct because it can never be in the service of legitimate government business,” Deane said.

But New Hampshire Solicitor General Anthony Galdieri told the justices Meehan and his legal team were the ones who made the lawsuit about one incident of mismanagement.

“The plaintiff got exactly what he asked for in this case. He argued to the jury in closing that DHHS had engaged in a single common plan to evade its policies to create an unsafe environment that caused all of the plaintiff’s injuries,” Galdieri said.

The jury returned its verdict in May of 2024 following a three-week trial that found the state was liable for one overall instance of “wanton, malicious, and oppressive” conduct that facilitated all of the rapes and beatings Meehan suffered. On the same form, the jury awarded Meehan a record-setting $38 million damages award.

When jurors found out the state planned to challenge the verdict based on the way they filled out the jury form, members contacted Meehan’s legal team expressing shock and dismay.

“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 jury foreman wrote to Meehan attorney Rus Rilee.

There is no timeline for the Court to reach its decision, and Thursday’s hearing featured a bench with just three justices. Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald recused himself from the case, and Associate Justice Anna Barbara Hantz Marconi is not sitting on any new cases because she is retiring in February.

This article first appeared on InDepthNH.org and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.