If a serious civil sex abuse lawsuit case gets to the the stage where a jury makes a decision and as in the West Virginia case,what would happen from then on?

I was expecting the West Virginia case to reach a conclusion that way without an out of court settlement.However church lawyer jumped in and got the settlement out of court they wanted if the worst for their case was to happen.

What would happen?
The church would immediately appeal. And drag the appeal out for years and years, all the while denying any culpability.

Remember, this wasn't ever about money for the church. They've got plenty to burn on things like this.

This was always about PR and image. They settled because they could avoid a jury awarding damages (and accepting church liability), and because they could make NDAs a part of the settlement, so nobody can talk about it.

Quentin Cook Wrote:
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> If a serious civil sex abuse lawsuit case gets to
> the the stage where a jury makes a decision and
> as in the West Virginia case,what would happen
> from then on?
>

Lots of exciting stuff!! It's likely that there was a request for punitive as well as actual damages, and there seemed to be plenty of testimony to serve as a basis for punitives...

Hie is correct that there would certainly be some type of appeal, from too big an award, too procedural errors, and lots of etceteras. In some jurisdications the money won by the plaintiffs would have to be deposited and the money earned as interest paid to whomever was determined to deserve it. In other jurisdications, a flat rate interest charge clicks every month the defendant has the money, with that interest amount also due to the plaintiff when there's a final determination.

Appealing a case costs a lot of money, but as Hie pointed out the church has a surfeit of the stuff, thanks to the sheep.

One thing a trial does is preserve testimony. It's not in the court file, but the court stenographer has her record and he/she will gladly sell copies to anyone who asks. And I doubt the church was excited about having their defense testimony on file for anyone to read, because it would no doubt have all sounded quite hollow, especially when they got around to asking the bishop and others about communications they had with Salt Lake. Just the fact that there's notice that Salt Lake monitors all these happenings sounds bad... Getting testimony on the record that there's a phone number the bishop is supposed to call BEFORE he calls the police would get some peoples' dander up.

There was an earlier appeal in this case, and I featured it in a prior post. The thing about appeals is that the appellate court writes a decision, which a trial court never does: you just get verdict. These written decisions, when you lose, can be terrible records for the losing.

I found the appellate decision. The church got an appellate court to side with it, but then the West Virginia Supreme Court heard the matter and they ripped the church a new one. Their written decision offers a lot of insight into this case:
http://www.courtswv.gov/supreme-court/docs/spring2017/16-0008.pdf And remember, this was before the trial began.

> I was expecting the West Virginia case to reach a
> conclusion that way without an out of court
> settlement.However church lawyer jumped in and got
> the settlement out of court they wanted if the
> worst for their case was to happen.

The structure of your declarative statement indicates you think think the "...church lawyer got the settlement out of court they wanted..."

I feel very strongly that the church for sure wanted the case settled out of court, but the figure they had to pay most certainly was more than they'd been offering earlier. I figure the plaintiffs got more than they'd expected to get. You know how it is in a negotiation: you ask for a ton more than you want so that you can give some away and still feel that you got what you deserved.

In this instance the plaintiffs were holding all the cards. They could name their pie-in-the-sky figure and the choice the church had was pay it or wait to see what the jury awarded. And they had to know, from professional jury consultants watching the proceedings that the jury was building up a nice hatred of the church.

This was a fascinating case to watch; the church received faulty revelation from the git-go. They ended up paying probably twice what it would have cost to settle when the first kerfuffles were stirring.

Not only did the church end up paying more than they expected, they also let the plaintiffs get a lot of the embarrassing information onto the public record. There was far more press attention than the church presumably wanted.

By going so far this time, furthermore, the church has effectively advertised both its record of paying off plaintiffs and its vulnerability in jury trials. The number of people lodging suits is likely to increase substantially.

This raises a number of questions. Why did the church opt for litigation? Are the people making the decisions at the top more obdurate than they used to be? What was Oaks's role? He's a smart man, clearly, but sometimes he seems unduly confident in his own ability to predict the outcome of public and private conflicts.

Conversely, was the Joseph Bishop case related to the belated decision to settle? Is SLC trying to prevent the convergence, in the political and media consciousness, of the Bishop and Jensen cases?

Just wanted to point out that we don't know if the church opted for litigation.
They may very well have (in fact, it's practically certain they did) make settlement offers early on. They may simply have not been attractive to the plaintiffs at that point (they almost certainly started with a very small amount of financial compensation).

So the plaintiffs went on with litigation...then the church tried to get themselves out via the motion elderolddog described above. They got an early "victory," only to have the state Supreme court reverse that. And back to litigation they went.

I suspect they made another settlement offer (or two) at that point, again rejected by the plaintiffs as being insufficient.

Once the trial was clearly not going their way, they finally ponied up an offer decent enough for the plaintiffs to consider. And finally accept. I don't blame the plaintiffs for that -- there's no guarantee they would have won, even though things looked that way.

It would have been interesting to find out all of the offers they made along the way. But we probably can't now, given the NDAs in the settlement that was accepted.

My unspoken assumption is that when a rich organization is sued, it always has the option of buying off the plaintiff. If it offers too little money, the organization has in effect opted for litigation.

That is what happened here. The church balked at the original demands and decided to let the litigation proceed. When the course of the litigation demonstrated that the church would probably lose, it decided to terminate the process at a considerably higher price.

At all stages the church had effective veto power over the proceedings.

True. Unless the plaintiffs were dead-set against settling under any circumstances -- then they would have had all the power and the church's "veto" (by money) wouldn't have mattered...

The settlement, coming so late, is still a big black eye for them. I read the entire document elderolddog posted above...very disturbing, and I'm glad the WV Supreme Court called them on their BS.

It was a close call whether the church should have fought the jurisdictional question. Better, probably, to settle immediately.

Not a close call once the supreme court had ruled against the church. Since everyone knew the facts would be humiliating to the church, any degree of hearings would hurt its reputation.

But for some reason, the church opted to proceed with hearings--ensuring that the record would be established. And then they had to pay to kill the case.

So much trouble would have been avoided if the church had been humble enough to listen to real advice from real lawyers and PR people. The way they went ensured a high payout AFTER the publication of very embarrassing details.

I would like to know more about the decision to proceed in the lower court after the supreme court decision. That seems so self-defeating. . . There may well have been a senior church leader who overruled the plans of the legal team.

In any case now the world knows like never before that the church tolerates serious abuse, that it is legally vulnerable for doing so, and that it is willing to pay big bucks. This is close to a worst-case scenario for the boys in the red velvet seats.

Dang that was a long read 78 pages. Some of which I had to look words up. However, very damaging to the lip service that TSCC gives to protect the abused.

In keeping with almostgone1's observations about the damage in the details, I'd again suggest (for those who have the stomach) listening to the the devastating Radio Free Mormon broadcast describing the Joseph Bishop coverup.

https://mormondiscussionpodcast.org/2018/03/radio-free-mormon-28-church-sex-scandal-cover/

There is a lot of commonality between the two scandals, especially regarding official dissimulation and coverup techniques. If the two stories were to converge, the world would see behind the veil and witness the church in all its glory.