A $2 million compensation award made by a High Court judge in favour of a teenage boy who was the victim of bullying and sexual abuse at two institutions has been slashed by the Court of Appeal.

In a decision delivered on Wednesday, three Court of Appeal judges reduced the compensation award to $844,650.

In June, the judges Justices Peter Rajkumar, Charmaine Pemberton and Mira Dean-Armorer presided over the appeal of the Attorney General.

Attorneys for the State had submitted there were no breaches to the boy’s constitutional rights since he was put at the St Michael’s Home for Boys by an order of the magistrate as a place of safety. It was the State’s position that the boy was sent to the St Ann’s facility on the recommendation of a psychiatric consultant, and by being admitted there, he was not denied his rights to liberty.

He was later removed and put in the care of the Children’s Authority.

In the ruling delivered by Rajkumar, the judges, however, agreed that the boy’s detention at St Michael’s from June 10, 2014 and May 18, 2015-October 5, 2016, was unlawful. They also declared his detention at the St Ann’s Hospital from October 6, 2015-October 12, 2017, breached his rights to protection of the law.

The total amount of court-ordered compensation is to be put in an interest-bearing account with payments to be made on application to the Registrar or a Master of the court for the boy’s expenses.

In 2019, Justice Avason Quinlan-Williams ordered compensation for the boy of $2 million, which was to be held in trust until he turned 18.

Quinlan-Williams had described the boy’s story as “disheartening.” Two years earlier, she had ordered his removal from the St Ann’s Psychiatric Hospital.

In 2014, aged nine, he was placed in St Michael’s after his mother was convicted of wilfully abandoning and neglecting him. He was eventually diagnosed with Prader-Willi Syndrome and later transferred to the St Ann’s Hospital. While he was there, his mother claimed he was sexually assaulted by another inmate in a bathroom.

Even while at St Michael’s, his mother alleged that he was constantly sexually harassed by staff, bullied and made to perform sexual acts by other residents.

In October 2016, he was referred to St Ann’s for psychiatric evaluation and from then until the court intervened the following year, he remained a patient there.

She had said the State, with financial oversight, legal and moral responsibility for the boy, ought to have provided special accommodation for children like the boy who suffered from medical and physical disabilities, pointing out that to date, the State has failed to allocate the necessary resources to establish appropriate facilities for the care of mentally and/or disabled children.

In their unanimous ruling, the Appeal Court judges said while the boy was properly sent to St Michael’s in 2012 by order of a magistrate when his mother was charged for child abandonment, his remaining there after 2014, w