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It began with three words: “They raped me.”
David Meehan’s revelation to his wife seven years ago launched an unprecedented criminal investigation into New Hampshire’s state juvenile detention center, which was built in the 1850s as a “reform house.” It is now called the Sununu Youth Services Center, in honor of former Governor John H. Sununu, father of the current governor.
Eleven former state workers face criminal charges and dozens more are accused in the nearly 1,200 lawsuits former residents have filed against the state alleging abuses spanning six decades. The first lawsuit, filed by Meehan four years ago, goes to trial this week.
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“In some ways, it’s comforting to know that I helped these other people find the strength to be able to tell the truth about their experience,” Meehan told The Associated Press in 2021. “But at the same time, it hurts in a way that I can’t. explain it knowing that a lot of other people were exposed to the same type of things as me.
Meehan was originally the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit that a judge later dismissed. Now, his individual lawsuit is the first to go to trial, with more expected later this year. Jury selection in Rockingham County Superior Court is expected to be completed Tuesday morning, followed by opening arguments.
The trial is expected to last weeks and will be the most public display yet of an unusual dynamic in which the state attorney general’s office has been simultaneously prosecuting perpetrators and defending the state against accusations raised in civil cases. While one team of state attorneys attempts to undermine Meehan’s credibility, another team will rely on his story to prosecute former workers during upcoming criminal trials.
“This case and the criminal cases are closely related,” Judge Andrew Schulman wrote last month. “The evidence in this case comes in part from the criminal investigation. In determining which course to choose in either case, the Attorney General cannot separate the facts into two piles, one civil and one criminal.”
Meehan was 14 when he was sent to what was then called the Youth Development Center in Manchester in 1995. Over the next three years, he alleges he was routinely beaten, raped hundreds of times and held for months in prison. isolation. According to his lawsuit, a worker who subjected him to almost daily abuse initially gained his trust by giving him snacks and arranging for him to play basketball with local high school students. He accuses other workers of standing guard or restraining him during the assaults, and says that when he told a supervisor how he had been left with a black eye and a split lip, the man interrupted him and said, “Look, little buddy, that It just doesn’t happen.” “.
The lawsuit seeks at least $1.9 million for past and future loss of income, plus compensation for pain and suffering, permanent impairment and loss of quality of life. It accuses the state of failing in its duty to act in Meehan’s best interests and of enabling abuse by being negligent in hiring, training and supervising employees.
The state denies those allegations and maintains that it is not responsible for the intentional criminal conduct of “dishonest” employees. The state also questions the nature, extent and severity of Meehan’s injuries, arguing that he contributed to them and that some of the alleged physical abuse in question was “excused as necessary to maintain order and discipline.”
The state also argues that Meehan waited too long to come forward. New Hampshire’s statute of limitations for these types of lawsuits is three years from the date of the injury, but there are exceptions in cases where victims were unaware of the injury or its connection to the wrongful party.
On the criminal side, the statute of limitations for sexual assault involving children runs until the victim turns 40 years old. Ten men have been charged with sexually assaulting or acting as accomplices to the assault of more than a dozen teenagers at Manchester Detention Center from 1994 to 2007, while an eleventh man faces charges related to a preventive detention in Concord. The first criminal trial was scheduled for this month, but last week a judge delayed it until August.
Schulman, the judge who oversaw Meehan’s trial, has said those charges do not make anything in Meehan’s case more or less likely. He also warned Meehan’s lawyers to stick to the facts.
“This is a lawsuit, not a Manichean battle between light and darkness,” he wrote last month. “Inappropriate appeals to passion, which ring like a bell that cannot be lifted, are the stuff mistrials are made of.”
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