Maryland High Court Weighs Sovereign Immunity Claim for Some Sex Abuse Lawsuits

The 2023 law effectively eliminated time barriers, known as statutes of limitations, for someone to file a court claim of institutional sex abuse, giving long-silent victims a pathway to the courtroom. However, at the center of the current legal battle are roughly 1,300 cases in which the alleged sexual assaults took place before 1982, a historical period when the state of Maryland enjoyed absolute immunity from civil lawsuits. The Supreme Court of Maryland is now being asked to decide whether the General Assembly, when it passed the landmark 2023 law, clearly and knowingly waived that sovereign immunity.

The appeal heard Monday involves a specific claim of sexual abuse dating back to 1977, when a plaintiff known in court documents only as J.C. was a patient at the old Prince George’s Hospital Center. During her stay at the facility, J.C. claims a doctor molested her.

Jonathan Massey, the attorney representing J.C. before the state’s highest court, argued that the waiver of damage caps included in the 2023 law serves as definitive proof of the legislature’s intent to open the state up to liability, even for historical claims preceding 1982.

The legislative shift “is the waiver of state sovereign immunity, and make changes that assume there will be a damages cap, assuming there will be liability to the state, right? That’s why you need a damages cap because there’s going to be liability to the state. I don’t think the legislature was silent in 2023 on the issue of sovereign immunity,” Massey asserted during oral arguments before the justices.

Conversely, lawyers representing the state have maintained that Maryland was heavily protected by the doctrine of sovereign immunity during the 1970s and early 1980s. Prior to July 1, 1982, the state could not face civil lawsuits under traditional legal doctrines, and state attorneys have actively asked trial judges across Maryland to dismiss pre-1982 cases on those exact grounds.

Attorneys representing the state have filed roughly 200 motions to dismiss cases involving claims that occurred before July 1, 1982. The state’s legal defense rests on the principle that the legislature must expressly and unmistakably waive a decades-old immunity provision, something they argue the 2023 statute simply did not do.

Judges at the Circuit Court level have delivered mixed rulings on the matter since the legal challenges began. A Prince George’s County court previously denied the state’s motion to dismiss without holding a hearing or providing a written explanation. However, judges in Frederick County and Baltimore City took a different approach, agreeing entirely with the state’s position and dismissing several cases under the sovereign immunity argument.

The Supreme Court’s eventual ruling on this complex issue carries immense financial implications for the state budget. Cases involving allegations occurring before July 1, 1982, comprise about 11% of the roughly 12,000 total cases that have been filed under the Child Victims Act since its passage.

While the 2023 law capped damages against the state at $890,000 per occurrence, the exact legal definition of an “occurrence” remains a fiercely debated point of contention among legal scholars and litigators.

The full extent of the state’s potential financial liability has never been officially or publicly stated in exact terms, but rough fiscal estimates point toward potentially budget-busting consequences for Maryland taxpayers. If each of the affected plaintiffs alleged just one occurrence and subsequently received the maximum statutory award, the potential liability for the state could reach approximately $11 billion. That staggering estimate is nearly four times the structural budget gap projected for the fiscal 2028 budget, which is scheduled to be introduced in January.

Furthermore, the potential payout could climb even higher if a court or jury ultimately defines an “occurrence” as each individual instance of abuse, rather than bundling multiple instances based on related circumstances, though future legal settlements could potentially reduce the final financial burden.

If lawyers for the state are ultimately successful in getting the pre-1982 cases blocked entirely, it would reduce the state’s total potential liability by “more than a billion dollars,” according to calculations previously argued by the Office of the Attorney General in a court filing earlier this year.

During the nearly hour-long oral arguments Monday, the justices appeared intensely focused on whether the text of the Child Victims Act waived sovereign immunity in an unambiguous manner, and whether legislative intent alone could be leveraged to rule that the General Assembly had implicitly waived that historic protection.

“If their intent was to undo sovereign immunity, isn’t it a little odd that they didn’t mention it?” Chief Justice Matthew Fader asked Massey during the hearing.

Massey countered that the General Assembly made its underlying objectives clear through the establishment of specific damage caps and through the robust legislative debates that preceded the bill’s passage, demonstrating that lawmakers fully understood what they were doing and what the potential costs might be.

However, Chief Justice Fader openly questioned whether anyone in the legislature during the 2023 session was actually aware of the historical immunity that ended in the early 1980s with the passage and evolution of the Maryland Tort Claims Act.

“What it doesn’t necessarily indicate to me is an intent to undo a sovereign immunity protection that they seemingly were just unaware of,” Fader said. “And if that’s the case, if they thought that liability would go back before 1982 because they just weren’t aware that there was a sovereign immunity protection in place, that doesn’t seem to me to be an intent to undo that sovereign immunity protection. It’s just an unawareness of it.”

Ryan Dietrich, an assistant attorney general representing the state, echoed those judicial skepticism points, telling the justices that nothing within the four corners of the enacted law could be reasonably interpreted as a clear waiver. He argued that relying on legislative intent is fundamentally insufficient when dealing with state immunity.

“I think what we heard from a friend on the other side about the legislative history is they say we think, we assume, and when we think and when we assume, that’s hallmarks of ambiguity,” Dietrich told the court.

“To the extent that the legislature did not speak clearly, unambiguously, and expressly, this court must err on the side of saying that sovereign immunity has not been waived, and send it back to the legislature to say, ‘What did you really mean?’” he added.

The Supreme Court of Maryland has taken the case under advisement, and a final ruling is expected in the coming months, which will determine the legal fate of thousands of survivors and shape the state’s financial outlook for years to come.