Delaware Jury Returns $63 Million Verdict Against Defrocked Priest and Parish in Landmark Clergy Abuse Case

In the mid-1960s, John Vai was a young teenager attending St. Elizabeth's Parish in Wilmington, Delaware, when Francis DeLuca, a priest assigned to the parish school, began sexually abusing him. The abuse continued over several years. Vai eventually came forward after learning that another former parishioner, Robert Quill, had filed a similar lawsuit against DeLuca in 2007. Delaware's Child Victims Act, which temporarily suspended the statute of limitations for civil claims arising from childhood sexual abuse, gave Vai a legal window to seek accountability decades after the harm occurred.

The case proceeded to an eight-week trial in Kent County Superior Court in fall 2010. By the time the case reached the jury, Judge James T. Vaughn Jr. had already entered a directed verdict against DeLuca, who was then in his eighties, in poor health, and did not appear at trial. DeLuca had been defrocked in 2008 following a criminal conviction in New York for molesting his adult grandnephew. The central contested question before the jury was whether St. Elizabeth's Parish bore institutional responsibility for what DeLuca did to Vai.

Thomas Crumplar of Jacobs and Crumplar, together with co-counsel from The Neuberger Firm and Raeann Warner, argued that parish leadership had known or should have known of DeLuca's conduct and failed to act. The defense, represented by Colleen Shields for St. Elizabeth's, contested liability. The jury found that the parish was reckless, grossly negligent, and negligent in not preventing the abuse.

On December 1, 2010, the jury returned compensatory damages of $30 million against DeLuca and $3 million against St. Elizabeth's. A separate punitive damages phase followed. When that phase concluded, the jury assessed an additional $30 million against DeLuca, bringing his total liability to $60 million. St. Elizabeth's punitive exposure added $1 to the parish's award, for a combined judgment of $63,000,001 against both defendants.

Victim advocates described the compensatory damages alone as the largest ever awarded in a U.S. clergy abuse case. The verdict was also the first time a parish itself, rather than a diocese or an individual priest, was found liable by a jury for covering up the conduct of one of its priests. No reduction or remittitur of the verdict has been reported in available public records. The Catholic Diocese of Wilmington, which had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in October 2009, separately reached a $77 million global settlement with abuse claimants in 2011.