$15 million verdict on child sexual abuse case is upheld

The Court of Appeals holds that a $21 million judgment against the defendant in a child sexual abuse case was not excessive.

The case is Mirlis v. Greer, issued on March 3. I wrote about other aspects of the case at this link and that link. Now we talk about damages. What you should know about damages is that juries are not given much guidance on what to award victorious plaintiffs. So the jury gives an amount it deems fair, and the trial and appellate courts then figure out over the next year or two whether the amount was too much. The courts rely on similar cases to determine whether the damages fell within the reasonable range.

In federal court, appellate judges determine whether jury verdicts are too high by asking whether the amount "shocks the conscience." That standard of review is deferential to the juries. Under a Supreme Court ruling from the 1990s, Gasperini v. Center for the Humanities, state-law verdicts in federal court in New York are afforded less deferential review under the CPLR. This case applies Connecticut law, so "shocks the conscience" does not apply, though the standard incorporates it somewhat; the standard is whether the award "falls somewhere within the necessarily uncertain limits of just damages or whether the size of the verdict so shocks the sense of justice as to compel the conclusion that the jury was influenced by partiality, prejudice, mistake or corruption."

This judgment is not too high. In one case from 2019, a Connecticut court upheld a $15 million verdict where the defendant sexually abused the plaintiff from the time she was six years old until she turned 17. Another case, against the Boy Scouts, upheld a $7 million award where the victim was sexually abused three times. In Mirlis's case, the evidence shows that plaintiff was sexually abused in a variety of ways for several years, and that his pain and suffering is extensive and will have lifelong consequences. The $15 million pain and suffering award was "undoubtedly high," but not excessive in comparison to other awards, particularly on a "per incident basis." (The rest of the award was for punitive damages and interest).