Both sides are calling for a resolution of the verdict dispute in the abuse case at a youth center in New Hampshire

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) — The $38 million verdict in a landmark trial over abuse at a New Hampshire youth correctional facility remains in dispute nearly four months later. Both sides filed their final motions with the judge this week.

“It is almost time to fully present and decide the facts,” Judge Andrew Schulman wrote in an order earlier this month, giving the parties until Wednesday to submit their motions and supporting documents.

At issue is the $18 million in compensatory damages and $20 million in aggravated 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 sparked a major criminal investigation that resulted in several arrests, and his lawsuit seeking to hold the state accountable was the first of more than 1,100 to go to trial.

The dispute concerns a portion of the verdict in which the jury found the state liable for only one “incident” of abuse at the Manchester facility, now called the Sununu Youth Services Center. The jury was not told that under the law, damages against the state are capped at $475,000 per “incident.” Some jurors later said they had written “one” on the verdict form to indicate 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 the cap requested by the state would be an “unreasonable miscarriage of justice.” But in his Aug. 1 order, he indicated that the only other option would be to order a new trial because the state had not allowed him to adjust the number of incidents.

Meehan's lawyers, however, asked Schulman to throw out only the part of the verdict in which the jury mentioned one incident, leaving the $38 million award in place, or to order a new trial to determine only the number of incidents.

“The court should not be so quick to throw the baby out with the bathwater because the jury made a single error,” they wrote.

“To force a man – who the jury found was seriously injured by the wanton, malicious or oppressive conduct of the state – to choose between reliving his nightmare in a new and very public trial or accepting one-eightieth of the compensation the jury intended is a grave injustice that cannot be tolerated in court,” wrote attorneys Rus Rilee and David Vicinanzo.

But the state's lawyers provided a detailed explanation of why imposing a cap is the only right course of action. They said jurors could have found that the state's negligence created “a single, harmful environment” in which Meehan suffered harm, or they could have believed his testimony about only a single, episodic incident.

In support of their latter argument, they cited the testimony of an expert “according to which the mere fact that the plaintiff sincerely believes that he was raped multiple times does not mean that this was actually the case.”

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

The trial in the first criminal case begins on Monday. Victor Malavet, who has pleaded not guilty to 12 counts of aggravated sexual assault, is accused of attacking a young girl in a detention center in Concord in 2001.

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