{"id":6914,"date":"2026-10-05T07:26:47","date_gmt":"2026-10-05T07:26:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/?p=6914"},"modified":"2026-10-05T07:26:49","modified_gmt":"2026-10-05T07:26:49","slug":"3-injury-cases-from-new-hampshire-that-produced-a-verdict-no-one-was-expecting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thelawyerworld.com\/blog\/3-injury-cases-from-new-hampshire-that-produced-a-verdict-no-one-was-expecting\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Injury Cases From New Hampshire That Produced A Verdict No One Was Expecting"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
New Hampshire juries and judges are, by reputation, careful people. They are also, now and then, the people who hand down a result that makes everyone in the courtroom and everyone reading about it the next morning ask the same thing. How did that happen? Three cases from this state do that to me every time I go back to them and I have gone back to them more than once. The first is still going, the second was decided in 2007 and the law behind it has not moved since and the third is from 1991 and explains why injury law in this state looks the way it does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I am not a judge and I was not in any of these courtrooms. I am reading the opinions and the court files like anyone else can. But the three together say more about what an injury case in this state really is than any list of accident types.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The three, in one place, before the stories:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Equal protection, Part I, Article 12<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
The Jury Said $38 Million. The Law Said $475,000. The Judge Said He Could Not Fix It.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
David Meehan was a teenager in the state’s Youth Development Center in Manchester in the late 1990s. In 2024, in Rockingham Superior Court, a jury heard four weeks of evidence that he had been raped and beaten there, hundreds of times, by people the state employed and that the state had been negligent in letting it happen. The jury found the state 100 percent liable and awarded him:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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18 million dollars in compensatory damages.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
20 million dollars in enhanced compensatory damages, for conduct it found wanton, malicious or oppressive.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
38 million dollars in all, the largest civil jury verdict in the state’s history.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
And then, within hours, the Attorney General’s office said the state would pay 475,000 dollars.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Whoa. I wonder what the reason was and the reason turns out to be a box on a form. New Hampshire’s sovereign immunity statute, RSA 541-B:14, caps what one person can collect from the state at 475,000 dollars per “single incident”. The jury’s verdict form had a question on it asking how many incidents Meehan had proved. The jurors, who had not been told about the cap and had just written 38 million dollars on the same sheet, answered: one. The foreman later said he felt duped when he read the state’s statement. Other jurors said the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Judge Andrew Schulman, who ran the trial, wrote that the cognitive dissonance between a 38 million dollar verdict and a finding of a single incident could not stand and that it would be an unconscionable miscarriage of justice. Then, in November 2024, he reduced the award to 475,000 dollars anyway and used the word reluctantly, because he found he had no legal authority to change the jury’s answer to that question or to reconvene the jury and ask what they meant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So the judge who called the result a miscarriage of justice was the judge who entered it and under New Hampshire law as it stood that was the only honest thing he could do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The New Hampshire Supreme Court heard the appeal in November 2025 and asked both sides to brief what “single incident” means. As of this writing I cannot find a decision. Hundreds of other former residents of that facility have cases waiting on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A Boy Died On A Jump The Resort Built. The Court Said The Resort Owed Him No Duty At All.<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
On January 3, 2004, Louis Cecere was snowboarding at Loon Mountain. He went off a feature in the terrain park called the Tombstone Jump, a jump Loon had designed, built out of snow and put on it’s trail map, did not land it and died two days later. His mother sued for negligent design, construction and maintenance of the jump.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
She lost without a trial. The Superior Court granted summary judgment to Loon and in May 2007 the New Hampshire Supreme Court affirmed. Cecere v. Loon Mountain Recreation Corp., 155 N.H. 289. The reasoning, in the court’s own order:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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RSA 225-A:24 says a skier accepts the inherent risks of the sport as a matter of law and cannot sue the operator for injuries caused by them.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
The statute lists “variations in terrain” as an inherent risk.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
A jump is a change in the physical features of the land, so a jump is a variation in terrain.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
Therefore a man made jump the resort built is an inherent risk and an injury from an inherent risk cannot have been caused by negligence, because the operator owed no duty to protect against it in the first place.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n
The court was honorable and so was the respected judge who wrote it and I still wonder how it is even possible. The resort built the thing. The resort decided how tall it was and how the landing fell away. And the law said that because it was made of snow and sat on a trail, it was the same as a rock or a tree and the question of whether it was built badly could never be asked. The court itself said it did not need to decide whether the statute would also cover reckless conduct, because the mother had only pleaded negligence. That question is still open in this state, twenty years on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you are hurt on a New Hampshire ski slope by something the resort put there, the first question a lawyer has to answer is not whether the resort was careless but whether the thing that hurt you counts as terrain and if it does, the case is over before it starts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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