A week ago, Loree Woods thought her family's yearslong fight to rebalance the scales of Nebraska's civil justice system had been won.
As she and her daughter, Taylor, watched from the Capitol's Rotunda in Lincoln, lawmakers voted to give final-round approval to legislation that would allow survivors of sexual abuse to seek compensatory damages in state court against institutions that had failed to keep them safe, even when such institutions are funded by taxpayers.
Championed by Omaha Sen. Justin Wayne, LB25 would rewrite Nebraska's law that bars state judges from awarding such damages in civil court cases against state or political subdivisions, including school districts, cities, villages, public power districts and more.
Lawmakers sent the bill to Gov. Jim Pillen's desk on a 28-17 vote as Loree and Taylor watched from behind the glass doors that separate lawmakers from the general public gathered in the Capitol, where the Woodses have grown accustomed to advocating for such civil court reform over the past five years.
"She was so excited," Loree said of Taylor, her 27-year-old daughter who is intellectually disabled.
"She was giddy," Loree said.
"She really thought we were done and we really thought we were done — and we're not."
Instead, Pillen, the state's first-term Republican governor who has made child advocacy one of his most frequent talking points through nearly 16 months in office, vetoed the bill Wednesday, calling it "overbroad" in a letter to lawmakers and warning that LB25 would "substantially erode sovereign immunity protections that have protected public funds."
Since the legislative session ended last week, the Legislature won't have a chance to override the governor's veto, ensuring LB25 won't be made law this year.
Wayne, the lawmaker who had pushed the bill through the Legislature, called Pillen's veto "a travesty of justice" that ensures the state's governments are afforded more protections than child victims of sexual assault.
"If the governor is afraid that the liability for holding government accountable would cost too much, then it begs the question: How many children are being sexually assaulted at the hands of government negligence?" Wayne wrote, accusing Pillen of choosing "the shadow of bureaucracy over justice for children."
For the Woods family, Loree said Thursday, "last night was a gut punch."
"It's so incredibly disappointing," she told reporters at an impromptu news conference at the Capitol.
As Pillen vetoed the bill that 17 state lawmakers — all registered Republicans in the officially nonpartisan Legislature — had voted against, the governor said LB25 would not protect the state's children and instead would "substantially increase the cost Nebraska taxpayers must bear for claims of abuse by government employees and even non-employees."
In lieu of the legislation, Pillen called on the state to "hold perpetrators accountable and protect children from abuse by enforcing the criminal laws that exist and by targeting the wrongdoer."
For Taylor, and others like her, no such remedies exist.
In 2016, Taylor was a 19-year-old participant in Lincoln Public Schools' Vocational Opportunity In Community Experience Program, one meant to prepare students with disabilities to gain the life skills they need to transition into adult living.
On Oct. 10, 2016, Taylor was left unsupervised for close to an hour inside the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's Abel Hall, where another unsupervised program participant sexually assaulted her on the 13th floor, her family alleged in a civil lawsuit against LPS in 2018.
In the lawsuit, the family's attorney, Eric Brown, cast Taylor's sexual assault as the result of negligence on the district's behalf, accusing LPS of failing to supervise Taylor and her alleged attacker, failing to properly train staff and failing to follow established policies dictating the program, among other alleged shortcomings outlined in the complaint.
Woods said the two sides were in mediation in September 2020, when the Nebraska Supreme Court ruling in a case known as Moser v. State found that Nebraska and its political subdivisions had immunity from lawsuits under the intentional tort exception of the state's Subdivision Tort Claims Act.
A month later, attorneys for LPS filed a motion for a summary judgment in the school district's favor, pointing to the sovereign immunity granted to political subdivisions in state law, according to court filings.
In December 2020, Brown filed his own motion to dismiss the case with prejudice on the Woods family's behalf. Loree said she understood that the district's attorneys intended to take the case to trial and call her daughter as a witness, an experience she couldn't fathom putting Taylor through.
In April 2021, District Court Judge Teresa Luther granted the family's motion, dismissing the case with prejudice — a designation that bars the Woods family from filing the same claim again in state court.
A police investigation into the alleged assault did not result in criminal charges.
And the VOICE program participant accused of sexually assaulting Taylor was allowed to participate in the same graduation ceremony she was, her mother said.
"We spend hours, if she has a flashback, crying, sobbing," Loree said Thursday. "'Why did he hurt me? I thought he was my friend.'
"I can't console her, a lot of times. And as a parent, being helpless — and then being helpless in the legal system — it's just another kick in the hind end because there's nowhere you have to turn. There's nothing we can do to make this better for her."
Loree, too, offered sharp criticism of her governor, who repeatedly noted the burden LB25 might have placed on Nebraska's taxpayers in his veto letter to lawmakers.
"If you're valuing taxes over a person's life and their livelihood and who they are — it just hurts my heart," she said.
Pillen has faced fierce criticism in the hours since he vetoed the bill from across the political spectrum, including from state lawmakers.
Omaha Sen. Megan Hunt, among the governor's most frequent and vocal critics, said Pillen had "failed child sex assault survivors" through his veto that amounted to "shielding big government wrongdoers."
"Legacy of a coward," she wrote on social media.
Sen. Julie Slama of Dunbar, a conservative, said Wednesday the state's children "deserved so much more than today’s veto" and declared that public schools "shouldn’t have special immunity from liability when a child is sexually abused in their care."
Still, other conservatives in the Legislature — including Sen. Carolyn Bosn of Lincoln, a former prosecutor — had argued that the accountability mechanisms in place for schools were sufficient, a rationale Pillen deployed in his veto letter Wednesday.
Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln, a civil rights attorney who met with Loree in Conrad's Capitol office Thursday in the wake of Pillen's veto, criticized the governor with the same fervor of some of her colleagues over the move — and denounced the Nebraska Supreme Court for affording the government such broad immunity.
She called the 2020 ruling "terrible" and said, plainly, "the court got it wrong."
"A decision of the Nebraska Supreme Court has closed the courthouse doors to families like Loree's," Conrad said. "The governor's veto pen has provided another roadblock to access to justice for families like Loree's.
"They're doing everything right. Working hard, raising their family and petitioning their government for change. They came to the people's branch — to the Legislature — and got that change and got that justice."
Then, on Wednesday, came the news the Loree's family had hoped wouldn't come: Pillen had vetoed the bill that they had fought for. There would be no override vote, no reversal, no remedy for the Woods family in their latest fight against their government.
Loree Woods (left) speaks next to Sen. Danielle Conrad of Lincoln during an interview on Thursday at the Capitol. Woods said her daughter, Taylor Woods, was sexually assaulted at Lincoln Public Schools' Vocational Opportunity In Community Experience Program. Gov. Jim Pillen vetoed LB25, which holds schools liable for sexual abuse.
Gov. Jim Pillen gives his closing remarks April 18 at the Capitol. Pillen on Wednesday vetoed LB25, meant to allow victims of child sex abuse to hold public schools accountable when schools play a "reckless" role in their abuse.