John Woodruff Kessel and Ray Miller Kessel, Plaintiffs Below, Appellees v. David Keene Leavitt, Anne Gilmore…

Summary

The Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia affirmed a Cabell County jury verdict awarding John Kessel $2 million in compensatory and $5.85 million in punitive damages against the defendants who placed his newborn son for adoption in Canada. The court held that Leavitt's failure to post a required appeal bond dismissed his appeal and affirmed the judgments against him, and that his codefendants lacked standing to challenge the personal jurisdiction ruling as to Leavitt. It recognized two new causes of action — fraudulent concealment of information about a newborn child's birth or whereabouts from an inquiring parent, and tortious interference with parental or custodial relationship accruing at birth — while holding that a father with substantially equal parental rights cannot maintain the interference tort against the child's mother, an error deemed not to require reversal because recovery could rest on the properly stated fraud claim. Justice Workman, concurring in part and dissenting in part, would have found the cumulative instructional errors so prejudicial as to require retrial for Anne Conaty and her parents.