Award cut in adoption-coercion case

LESLIE WOLF

The San Diego Union-Tribune

A jury had already decided that Bonnie Jo Williams, in trying to do the Lord's work and find babies for Christian families, misled a young Carlsbad woman into giving up her newborn child for adoption.

But Williams shouldn't have to pay $375,000 for that mistake, a Superior Court judge ruled yesterday.

Judge Sheridan Reed reduced the jury's award of punitive damages to the mother, Krista Stoner, to $25,000. Reed said Williams, who formerly worked for San Diego Pregnancy Services, led a simple life and could not afford the $375,000, which a jury set May 7 to punish the wrongdoing and deter future similar conduct.

Although Reed called the punitive damages excessive and slashed them, she refused to order a new trial. This means the award of another $275,000 in general damages -- decided by the jury against Williams and the pregnancy center -- will stand.

Williams' attorney said after the hearing that his client may have to declare bankruptcy rather than pay the damages, despite the fact that her husband earns nearly $100,000 a year.

Now it is up to Stoner to decide whether she will accept the reduced amount. If she rejects it, the contentious trial which proved that she had been defrauded and won her the money will have to begin anew.

Neither Stoner nor Williams attended the hearing yesterday.

Stoner was 19, pregnant and a homeless drug addict in 1988 when she sought help from San Diego Pregnancy Services, a nonprofit agency in Oceanside founded by women who met at a North County evangelical church and shared anti-abortion views, according to trial testimony.

Williams, known as "B.J.," was one of the founders and the agency's director of adoptions. She befriended Stoner and helped her choose a Christian family in Tennessee to adopt her child, the court was told.

Stoner changed her mind after the adoption proceedings began and tried to get her daughter back, but her first attorney failed to file the right paperwork on time and the adoption was completed, the court was told.

Even though she can never have her daughter back, Stoner hired prominent local attorney Milton J. Silverman to press her case again, this time with accusations of fraud and misrepresentation.

During the trial, Stoner testified that Williams coerced her into giving up her baby and made her choose the parents while she was in labor.

Stoner won.

"It was clear to me that the jury must have been very angry with B.J. Williams," the judge said yesterday.

But Reed said she disagreed with the jury's decision and would have ruled against Stoner.

"I would have come down the other way on it, personally," Reed said. "But my job is not to impose my judgment on a jury verdict."

In reducing the punitive damages, Reed said $25,000 "is serious punishment, and that's what the jury intended."

Attorney William Brown, Silverman's colleague, argued that $25,000 would not be enough to deter Williams in the future.

"What is to stop her from going out again and again and doing this to another young woman?" Brown asked.

Even though Williams testified during the trial that she had stopped doing adoptions, she was working on another one while the trial was under way, Brown said.

After yesterday's hearing, Brown said the other young pregnant woman for whom Williams was arranging an adoption learned of the Stoner case and contacted Silverman's office.

"We referred her to a recognized and reputable adoption attorney," Brown said, adding that the prospective adoptive parents in that case backed out of the adoption.