Posted by:
elderolddog
(
)
Date: April 02, 2018 05:40PM
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.