Rapist pastor protected by Ohio's damage cap

By Andrew Wolfson
Courier-Journal
December 24, 2016

http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/2016/12/24/rapist-pastor-protected-ohios-damage-cap/95793004/

Raped by her pastor during a counseling session near Columbus, Ohio, a 15-year-old girl and her family sued him and the church for retaining him, despite two previous claims he’d committed sexual misconduct with teenage girls.

A jury awarded them $3.5 million, to compensate for her trauma. But it was reduced to only $250,000 in damages under an Ohio law that limits recoveries to that amount for pain and suffering and other so-called non-economic damages.

In a bitter, divided opinion, Ohio’s high court this month upheld the reduction, rejecting the argument that child sex abuse victims often require a lifetime of psychiatric care.

The majority refused to carve out an exception to the state’s 11-year-old law, passed by Ohio’s legislature to provide “a fair, predictable system of civil justice that preserves the rights of injured parties while curbing frivolous lawsuits, which increase the costs of doing business, threaten Ohio jobs, drive up consumer costs, and may hinder innovation.”

The law does exempt those who suffered “permanent and substantial deformities.” But in a withering dissent, two justices blasted the state General Assembly and their colleagues.

“It turns out that ‘tort reform’ (and the justices who sanctioned it) also ensured that rapists and those who enable them will not have to pay the full measure of damages they cause — even it they rape a child,” one of them wrote, adding that damage caps were “designed to protect doctors and corporate interests.”

The other said: “I cannot accept the proposition that a teenager who is raped by a pastor fits into a preordained formula for damages ... a cookie-cutter approach simply does not work.

“Shame on the General Assembly,” he added. “The children are watching. And I for one do not like what they are seeing.”