Maryland Supreme Court hears arguments in child sexual abuse lawsuit

The Maryland Supreme Court on Tuesday heard arguments on the constitutionality of a 2023 law that ended the state’s statute of limitations on child sex abuse lawsuits following a report that revealed widespread wrongdoing in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The arguments, which lasted several hours and often turned into highly technical legal language, focused largely on the intent of the Maryland legislature when it passed a previous law in 2017 that said Marylanders who were sexually abused as children could file lawsuits until they became 38.

Teresa Lancaster, an abuse survivor and advocate for others, said she was optimistic after hearing in court.

“These crimes hurt a lot of people. We deserve our day in court. We deserve justice and I’m very, very excited by what we heard today,” Lancaster said outside court.

A decision by the state’s highest court is expected in the coming months.

Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, signed the Child Victims Act last year — less than a week after the state attorney general released a report documenting alleged abuse by Baltimore clergy over an 80-year period and accusing church leaders for decades of cover-ups.

The nearly 500-page report included details of more than 150 Catholic priests and others associated with the Archdiocese of Baltimore abusing more than 600 children. State investigators began their work in 2019.

Days before the new law took effect on Oct. 1, the archdiocese filed for bankruptcy to protect its assets ahead of an anticipated deluge of litigation. That means claims filed against the archdiocese will be relegated to bankruptcy court, but other institutions, such as Catholic schools and individual parishes, can still be sued directly.

While the court’s decision will have far-reaching effects on child sexual abuse cases in Maryland, Tuesday’s oral arguments focused on a technical issue involving the previous 2017 change to the law, which set the age limit at 38 years.

The question at issue is whether a provision in the 2017 legislation was written in such a way as to permanently shield certain defendants from liability. Answering that question likely requires the court to decide whether the provision should be considered a statute of limitations or a so-called statute of repose.

Lawyers for defendants facing liability claims under the new law argue it is a statute of repose, which they say cannot be amended because it includes a “right to be free from liability.”

“As a general matter, of course, a legislature may repeal existing laws and substitute new ones. But it may not do so in a manner that destroys substantial rights that have been conferred under existing law,” the Archdiocese of Washington wrote in a brief filed before oral arguments.

David Lorenz, director of the Maryland Priest Abuse Survivors Network, said the archdiocese should be ashamed of itself for “treating survivors as a product that has some limited liability.”

“And that’s what they’re doing by hiding behind the statute of repose,” Lorenz said after court. “They should be absolutely ashamed of it, and the next minute they’re saying, ‘We’re going to do everything we can for the survivors and help them get through this.’ They do nothing, nothing, but drive the survivors deeper and deeper underground, and it’s time for the survivors to come forward and start healing.”

Lawyers representing the companies, insurance companies and civil defense attorneys in Maryland expressed concern in a brief about problems with witness testimony and record preservation in cases that were filed decades after the fact.

But the most substantial arguments before the court on Tuesday focused on legislative intent.

Advocates for abuse survivors said that when the Maryland General Assembly passed the 2017 law, lawmakers did not intend to prevent future lawmakers from revisiting the issue and changing time limits on civil lawsuits. The law may have included the term “rest,” but that doesn’t mean the legislature meant to make it permanent, lawyers argued.

“There is a debate between that label — the statute of repose — and the actual operational function of the act,” attorney Catherine Stetson told the court’s seven judges, arguing that they should consider the statute’s structure, operation and full text, rather than looks at “a word in a vacuum.”

“Child sexual abuse is a scourge on society, and it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with what they have suffered,” the victims’ lawyers wrote in a brief. “It is hard to imagine a law more rationally related to a legitimate government interest than this.”

Some justices expressed skepticism about whether state lawmakers in 2017 knowingly chose the language with the intention of limiting the powers of their successors.

“If it had that meaning, wouldn’t you expect there to be more explanation in the legislative file?” asked Chief Justice Matthew Fader. “Wouldn’t it have appeared somewhere?”

Attorneys for the Archdiocese of Washington and Key School, a small private school in Annapolis, said the legislature was not ambiguous in its language.

“The General Assembly meant exactly what it said,” attorney Sean Gugerty told the court. “It is the plain language of the statute that controls the analysis.”

Judge Brynja Booth pointed out that interpreting the law is not always straightforward.

“We don’t often look beyond a label … to look at the features to determine what it actually means,” she said.

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