The Verdict - Part 1

The verdict is in. Karen and Mo talk about the case and how they feel after the jury has made its decision.

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Hosted by Karen Koehler and Mo Hamoudi, trial lawyers at Stritmatter Law, a nationally recognized plaintiff's personal injury and civil rights law firm based in Washington State.

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Mo Hamoudi
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Stritmatter Law
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Transcript

Taking A Case No One Would

0:00

We are here to talk about an amazing case. I know we've talked about case selection before and how you have to be really careful about it. This is one of those cases that I think 99% of people would not have taken. But we took it and we took it with a vengeance. And the story was that a gentleman called, and 50 years ago, in 19, between 1977 and 1981, he had been in foster care, and his foster parent had sexually abused him. Fifty years ago. It had just popped into his head out of the blue. He wanted to know if this guy was still alive. He looked him up on the internet and started going down a bunch of rabbits holes. Called DSHS, he had no more records on him. Called the police, got some records from 1981 when the guy was turned in and admitted to this, and he found out that for what he did to this kid, he was sentenced to one day in jail with a $500 fine. He didn't understand why no one had ever interviewed him. They only had his abuse down as being very limited in time, and it and it was like, you know, indecent conduct or something like that. It was very minor. And there was a second child placed in that home right before this first one had run away. I took the case, even though it was 50 years old, and even though there were no records, and we just started hoping. Interviewed him, and then he said, Can I join? No one had even talked to him about this case. No one, neither one of these guys got treatment, neither one of these guys got medical, neither one of these guys were forgotten. They were just, okay, this guy went, this guy was arrested, and they they moved on through the system. So what happens, you know, in a sex abuse case of a minor is there is an exception to the statute of limitations. You have to know that somebody is negligent. And they always knew that this guy, he wasn't negligent, he was a criminal. He intended to hurt them and did. They did not understand that they should never have been put in that house to begin with, or that they should have been monitored better until we got involved. Forward fast, almost three years later, after

When The State Claims No Records

2:38

the state denied that these kids were even foster children, there's no records, so they could say, no, they're not foster children, and that the guy was even licensed foster parent, that he even existed. We went into uh police files. We found things like school records that had the child's real name on it, and then the name of the um the molester who was named Deehan. We found all this peripheral stuff, not a lot of it, but some. And also it turned out that neither one of them had even told their kids, their wives knew or suspected, but they had never said a detail to anyone. They had never had ever met. So we go and Mo takes the charge of leading this discovery effort against the state. I'm dealing with, you know, getting a psychologist, and we're just working together in perfect harmony. We add in, and and our paralegals are Kristen and Jamie. We add in Darcy right um near the end when we're gonna be getting ready for trial, and she's gonna be the person that does all of our briefwriting during instruction things. And uh we bring in Isaac as our uh uh uh assistant to Jamie. So this we have this team, and we go to trial, we started

Trial Slowdown And A Bold No

3:56

trial, and it was the slowest thing that we've ever done. Um, and thank God. Um the judge spends the first week on motions, the judge spends a second week on choosing the jury. He's so slow, again, thank God, that we're able to just figure stuff out of how this is going down. And we learn that these jurors are fixated on the fact that the case is 50 years old. Remember, we took it three years ago knowing that, and when you do that, you just kind of take it for granted. Yeah, it's 50 years old, so what? Oh no. It was a big deal. And then you have a criminal guy. So we we get and we start the trial at the beginning of this month, and yesterday the jury verdict came in. The actual taking of evidence was six court days. One of those court days was closing argument, which took three hours just for us. It was only closing argument. So, really, truly, five court days of testimony, and the offer to settle the case was $1.6 million, which our clients turned down flat because they needed to speak their truth for the first time in their lives. Nobody had ever heard what they were gonna say. They had never actually met before trial, they had never actually seen each other before trial, not even a picture since the last time they saw each other 50 years ago. And it was one of the most hard, profound, touching, gut-wrenching experiences that I've ever had, and that anybody else, from my understanding on our team, has ever had. So we want to talk today. We can't encapsulate everything that happened because it was just so incredible.

Testimony That Changes A Room

5:56

I thought we would talk about some of the highlights of the trial and of the experience and focus on the trial. Okay. Uh highlight for me, I think, was that um uh for two men who've been abused and they're in the age that they are, it's basically their 60s. One of them was 62 and the younger one was like 59. That um uh being able to sit up there in public and have your experience recorded by the court and heard by 12 strangers with an alternate, 13 total strangers, and a courtroom filled with people and talking about it. I thought that the process was revealing in how it served that purpose. And you could actually see them as they were talking about the the experiences they had as children and traveling back in time and kind of like speaking to their child selves in this courtroom in front of these people, what it was happening to them, their body posture, how it was changing, their facial expressions. I thought that was the most, I thought, the most important part of the case. Um and talking about their shame and also their strength. I mean that there's shame and strength, I would say, is is that they go hand in hand. I think both games sort of exist when you're talking about being sexually abused as a boy by a grown man, you know, for men in particular, um, to talk about that in front of people brings with it a sense of shame because obviously you start to question your own sexuality, you start to question like who you are, are you strong, are you man enough, while you're talking about it. And then it requires a great deal of strength to speak about these things while you carry that shame, and you're expressing that shame to all everybody here in the courtroom. You know, I just I think that that probably had the greatest impact on the jury, apart from anything else. Talk about Mo continuing this discussion, that dynamic between those two individuals and the state of Washington, the government. The dynamic is is that uh, you know, kids

Institutional Betrayal By The State

8:32

don't have an understanding of who really is supposed to protect them when they are in the foster system. They know the caseworker, but they don't understand that the caseworker represents the government. Like when you get older, you realize like the government has a big responsibility in taking care of its citizens. And and so the the thing is that you have this sort of this amorphous entity that's the government sitting up here and making all these decisions about the child's welfare and placing them in this home and overseeing their care. And they totally failed to do that. They utterly failed to do that. They were it it's like an institutional betrayal, which is what actually the psychologist in the case, Jim Manley, talked about that institutional betrayal is one of the worst kinds of betrayal because the institution was supposed to protect them. It's a magnifier, he said. Yeah, it you know, it and and so I, you know, the the which you're the state is not a human being. The state is an entity, you cannot put the state into prison, you cannot bring the state into court and like say, you know, you're sentenced to ten years in prison for doing this or whatever, one day in jail and all that stuff. What you can do is you can morally condemn the state by what these men did in court by testifying. You know, every day that they, every moment that they were testifying in court, they were morally condemning the government. You know, and you know, the other aspect of it is we don't really, I don't think we're gonna get have time to get into it. The state is currently trying to reform the laws to stop people like these two men from coming into courtrooms and morally condemning them. They're trying to do that right now, working very hard, complaining that, oh, these jury verdicts overwhelming us, overwhelming, we can't afford to pay them. But guess what? This jury went through the verdict form and assigned fault to this guy and assigned fault to the state. They did it just fine, you know. And so I thought that like another thing was that the gaslighting that is going on and went on in this case, suggesting that these guys had bad memories, did not remember things properly. Oh they were 13. Yeah. It just, you know, I thought that I I didn't think that the state did itself any favors. There were two moments of that testimony that that will hit that really hit hard for me to understand, you know. You don't just say the terrible things that happened to you, and I mean, that's not how you talk, that's not how we present a damages case. We wanted those those men to help the jury understand. Um, and so just listing off uh the sexual acts is not that's not how you do that, which is terrible enough. Um, they gave us their memories. They gave us, they presented this jury, they told us their single most humiliating moments. Um, and it was really interesting that the things that stayed with them the longest both had to do with their faith. Yeah. So the first story was from Greg, and uh

Faith, Shame, And Permanent Scars

12:07

we'll just use their first names, and he was uh he recounted that um he had been raped, anally raped. Um he um, and I think this is one of the first times, and it was Sunday, he was in church, sitting there on a hard pew in pain, and that guy had his arm around him, around his shoulders, presenting him as his son to the community, church community. And he cannot get that out of his mind. He had gone to a new church with his wife as an adult, not long ago, even, and he said they were sitting in the back, they were just kind of checking out the church, and there was a man sitting next to a child with his arm on around the child, and he, and this is in a you know, house of worship, house of God. His wife is extremely religious. She gave all of us mini baby Jesus. And the thought to that came into his mind was I wonder if he's a pervert too. He must be. They never knew what it would be like to not have been abused like that. The second person, Marty, his story that he, it's one of his most memorable memorable stories, was he had been already removed from this guy's custody. The guy had served his day in jail or whatever. DSHS placed him with a buddy of his abuser who worked in the same company and attended the same church. And the buddy, who was his new foster parent, uh one day brought him to church. And he wasn't, he just went along. I mean, thought they were gonna go see the the pastor, which they did. There was the pastor who was there, and as he was walking up the aisle towards the pastor with his new foster parent, he saw a shape come into focus, and it was of the original foster parent abuser. They had arranged an intervention, and they told him that he was a liar and a sinner, he being the child, yeah, that he needed to apologize, and if he did so, he would be forgiven. And he remembered refusing, saying no, and wondering if he was gonna be able to get past God to the place where he would eventually want to be. And his comment to the jury when asked was you know, it is interesting, I didn't end up hating God, but I ended up hating the church. It's just it was just that kind of a case that our breath was taken away by the pain and the destruction that was involved because the state had failed so miserably. And Mo, maybe you can just Mo handled yeah, Mo handled liability beautifully. And I just want to tell you a backstory. First of all, we needed a we needed an expert because we needed

Proving Negligence Without A File

15:42

someone that knew what was going on in the 70s, and that person was Barbara Stone. Well, Barbara Stone was retiring, as she should be, in her 80s, and she said she was not taking any more cases and declined. Mo then batted his eyes at her, sent her some poetry, and she wrote a declaration so that we could get past one of the state's motions to dismiss the case. Well, then the state later on said, well, they wanted to depose her and they wanted her to be a witness, whatever. So I think we've already talked about this. Mo wrote a we opposed them calling her as a witness. Yeah. Very, very small motion. So she came, and then he also arranged for Jane Raymond, a second expert, to come. So we had two liability people, both of whom have worked for the state back in the 70s and 80s. Just give our audience an idea of how gross the state's conduct was, just list it a little bit for them. So uh the the foster parent was arrested, convicted, but the plea was set aside after uh post uh guilty plea deferment of the sentence in 1972. Um and that was for molesting two boys. Okay. Um then um prior to that he was employed by the school system and the public pool system um of being a swim coach, and he was uh engaging in inappropriate behavior while there. He mishandled money, he was taking pictures of boys in the shower, and this was all documented. Um, he had a brief marriage, which like six months in his early 20s, got annulled. Um, and uh so he wasn't stable at all. Wait, coincidentally, that occurred when he was going through that deferred sentencing process. As soon as he was cleared, he got the annulment. He got the annulment, and uh he was under the care of a doctor for his behavior. And so you have all of these instances, these facts were were documented. And then when he got licensed, um the question was did they find this stuff or not? Did they do enough diligence to find this information to license him? The problem was is that all of the DSHS records were destroyed. And what they did have is their manuals about what they were supposed to do at the time. And they did have his marriage and annulment records, because those are DSHS records in the 70s, but they didn't have anything about his licensing, they didn't have anything about homestudy, uh supervision, case notes, you know, incident reports, any of that. We didn't know any of that. And so what we were stuck with was like the state saying, like, well, you don't have any proof of what happened in this house. He must have lied, he must have manipulated, he must have not disclosed anything. So I think that made the case really challenging because uh we had to prove what should have happened through eyewitnesses, and Barbara and Jane, I thought, served as really good eyewitnesses because they were there in the times. They kind of gave us a sense of hey, uh, this is what we did, these are the things we would do. Well, they didn't work on this case, but general standards. General standards. Well, so let's let's move forward. So now we've kind of given you a snapshot of the case. So let's get to the trial part of it. So, Mike, you're on this jury.

How A Juror Weighs 1970s Standards

19:35

What's your number one issue? What to issue? Um Well, trying to decide if the states in the wrong, I guess, for what they did, which you know, uh it's hard for me to look at that as a juror because I already knew what you're looking at like 50 years ago, like the standards now are different than then. There's no internet. I and I thought about that when it first happened. I mean, you got you got the Department of Health and Services saying that they didn't know, so they aren't liable because this guy was a bad guy, but they didn't know, so it was okay for them to do that. Um but the even the evidence that you have already points that something was wrong, and then when you look at the you know, their manuals, their rules, I think that's where you kind of have to decide as a juror. Do you think that they knew that something wrong happened? Do you think that it's odd that there's no records that pertain specifically to this, but there are other records that have survived? And do you think that even though he's a bad person and this that this could have happened without the state being involved at all, is the state still liable for what he did? I would say yes. I I mean that's how I felt the whole time, is that you're hired. Yeah, I I I think that maybe the standards were worse back then for background check. Yeah. But I don't think they were that bad. And I think that it was a general, I mean, this is the same thing that happened with the with the priests that were abusing people back then. They would take situations like this and go, okay, it looks bad if it comes out in public, so we gotta squash this down and make sure that nothing happens about it. These were two children who couldn't defend themselves. And you know, the state allowed an abuser to do horrible things to them. Like I told Mo before we started this one, that means that you've got two people whose lives were. Ruined and we're never going to be the same no matter what happens from this case. They've lived, you know, they're pretty much as old old as me or a little bit older than me. This you know, this could have been me. Yeah. Well, let's talk about um a couple elements of trial. Let's start start off with opening,

A 1970s Social Worker Opening

22:22

and then let's go to an expert, and then let's talk about, you know, the plaintiff. I mean, we talked a little bit about the plaintiff, but let's talk about you know how we were approached it, what you think worked, what you think didn't work. You know, like it was it was it was very unusual. We I mean, we really we didn't even know how we were gonna do opening until after we listened to Vardir and realized, man, we gotta figure out how to connect them to 1977. Yeah, I mean, right out of the gates in Vardir, I I was I started to realize that the problem with the case was going back in time and trying to figure out how to bring time back to life for them because a lot of them were hyper focused on the age of the case. And so Karen came up with the idea of actually dressing up like a social worker from the 1970s. So we scurried over the weekend and pieced together That was one of your favorite things. I did have a lot of time. I went to I went to uh Goodwill and like Salvation Armies, I went to Value Village, and uh found an old, you know, those old pencil sharpeners from the 70s. Rotary, which by the way, never worked. I didn't do it because when I did it, the whole thing fell apart. The whole thing will fell apart. Yeah, but uh it looked good. Our our dear friend, our dear dear friend Kathy Kendred and Jack Kindred had a 1970s typewriter. So we got the typewriter, and then we got a stapler. I went and got a couple of life magazines from 1972-73, Nixon winning the White House, the Munich Games, and uh Kristen's phone. Kristen found a phone from the 1970s, those old dial phones. But it was really meant to be hanging on a wall. Yeah. And so I used my I had gone gone. It was all authentic. So I had a a bid red redwell full of papers from high school, because that was in the 70s, and I had it put on there at a slant so that the the handle would stay up there. And and so it I thought I thought it was it was great. You know, I think dangly earrings, I got a Paisley dress. You know, and I think we'll uh later on when we talked to the jury was that you know, at first the jury was like, what is she doing? Because her opening statement was like part telling the story of the case with the evidence that they were gonna hear, and part then going back and pretending to be the social worker sitting in front of them, literally dressed up, using the tools at the times to figure out you know what we expected the standard to be. Um Well, I don't break character when I do that, as you know from the decks. So I'm like, I'm like wait, imitate me doing the phone calls. Hello. Hello, this is a good idea. I'm just having like a one-sided conversation. Who? Alan Pollock? Alan Pollock? Who are you? You know, and like it was really nice. There was like 10 of them. It was really good. It was really good. I I you could tell that the jury was kind of smiling and smirking and thinking, like, oh, this is entertaining. And then they were trying to understand the relevance of it. But I don't think that they totally understood it until as the evidence came in, they're like, oh, I see what they're saying. It's connecting. So like that I thought was a very effective. Wait, you gotta tell them what they said at the end. I asked her if she was an actress. No, they they they were pretty sure it was. And then I just at that point I was like, He was mad because he was a theater guy. I was the guy. I'm the guy who was the act. What was really funny, I was like, in my mind, I'm going, oh great, I'm never gonna hear the end of this. That's why I had to say that right there. It's like, what did they ask? Yeah. I'm not gonna hear I'm not gonna hear the end of this. I told Shelly, and Shelly was laughing so hard because she knows because she can do the same thing where we're just like, hello, hello, what? No, really? I mean, we just go. Yeah. But you have to stay in character. That's the key, right? It's true. Just stay in the character. If you're gonna put on that character to tell your story, stay in it. And you know, she had her glasses and stuff. What's really great is that I think, you know, the liability experts look like that. They did. Like it would just they look like that. So they're like, oh. And so, like, in talking to them, you know, I'm asking them questions like And remember, the whole purpose is like, how hard is it to make a phone call and talk to people? Yeah. And then take a little note. So I would t the hyper writer, by the way, as cute as it was, you couldn't type with more than more than one letter at a time, otherwise, all of those they all just would like go like that. So I just I just would go on like this. And and so I you know, so when I'm asking questions of the experts, I'm asking them, take me back in time. I want to know like what did the office look like? Because I'm you know, I'm trying to connect it back to what she was doing in opening. You know, you guys have telephones? How did you did you meet? Did you caucus? Nathan's like, did you have a did you have a typewriter? They go, No, not really. And I'm like, ah, thanks, Nathan. Yeah. And then and then and so it just was like uh it was just sort of like connecting what she did in opening to what what the evidence was to just continue to take the jury back in time. Yeah, we don't have the documents about what they did or or what it's not that hard, folks. You know, we have phones now, they look different, but they had phones then. We had no taking now, but they had no ticking then. Yeah. You know, they have the police now, you have the police then. You know, it was just kind of this is not that hard. It is going back in time, but it's not hard to do it. So that was the whole goal of that. Yeah. How are we doing on time? Let's stop here and we'll do uh part two. Yeah.