MAINE
Bangor Daily News
By Darren Fishell, BDN Staff
Posted June 21, 2016
PORTLAND, Maine — A federal judge has tossed out a jury’s $14.5 million verdict against a Freeport-based advocate for children sexually abused by clergy, finding the plaintiffs’ defamation case had a fatal flaw from the start.
U.S. District Court Judge John Woodcock ruled Monday that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the complaint from Catholic brother Michael Geilenfeld and a nonprofit for which he worked because most of his life, assets and affairs are in Haiti and not his home state of Iowa.
In his opinion, Woodcock called the introduction of the late jurisdiction question “an extraordinary turn of events.”
“To say that the defendant raised this issue late is an understatement,” Woodcock wrote in the introduction to his opinion, “but unlike virtually any other legal issue, a court’s jurisdiction cannot be waived and may be raised at any time, even after a verdict and on appeal, because jurisdiction goes to whether the court can legally hear the case.”
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