Prince George’s judge rules Maryland’s Child Victims Act constitutional after challenge by Archdiocese of Washington
BALTIMORE — A Prince George’s County judge found Maryland’s Child Victims Act to be constitutional Wednesday afternoon after hearing arguments for and against it in the morning.
With her ruling, Circuit Judge Robin D. Gill Bright triggered what is expected to be an expedited appeals process headed up to the Supreme Court of Maryland.
The Child Victims Act, which was enacted last spring and took effect Oct. 1, allowed people who suffered sexual abuse as children to sue their abusers and the institutions that enabled their torment, no matter how much time had passed. Advocates for survivors celebrated the law as an avenue for victims to hold their abusers accountable, whenever they were ready to.
A deluge of lawsuits flooded Maryland courts in October, targeting the likes of churches, schools and youth correctional facilities for abuse allegedly perpetrated by priests, teachers, guards and others in positions of authority over children. At the same time, plaintiffs' attorneys prepared their clients for the lengthy legal fight that was expected to follow.
Lawmakers, having overcome years of pushback from the Catholic Church to pass the bill, included a provision in the law allowing for a mid-lawsuit appeal of its constitutionality. Though the appeal would go to the Appellate Court of Maryland, experts anticipate the appealing party to ask the state Supreme Court to hear the case and for the high court to take it up.
The first known legal challenge to the child victims law came from the Archdiocese of Washington, which argued in defense of a class-action child sex abuse lawsuit in Prince George’s County that the new law was unconstitutional. Similar challenges followed in at least seven other cases statewide, but the argument in Prince George’s was the first to make it into the courtroom.
Attorneys for the Washington diocese centered their argument on a 2017 Maryland law that extended until age 38 the legal period in which survivors of child sex abuse could sue their abusers and the institutions that employed them. The church’s lawyers contend the law included a provision granting defendants immunity from such claims filed after a survivor’s 38th birthday.
Little known until the debate on the child victims law, the provision is called a “statute of repose.” Lawyers for the church say it creates a “vested right” that cannot be repealed.
“Our position is that the plaintiffs’ claims were barred long ago by the statute of repose enacted in 2017,” said Richard Cleary, a lawyer for the diocese, in court Wednesday.
“Under the Child Victims Act, there’s a total abolition of the statute of repose” and a restoration of civil claims once barred by the amount of time that passed, Cleary continued. “That law was unconstitutional.”
The lawsuit in Prince George’s alleges that a group of men were abused as young children by priests, deacons or others employed by Washington diocese, which covers five Maryland counties and is headquartered in Hyattsville. The class-action complaint says their torment fit a pattern of abuse and cover-up in the archdiocese.
Survivors’ attorneys argue the Child Victims Act is constitutional.
They say the 2017 law didn’t create a statute of repose but rather a statute of limitations, which the Maryland General Assembly has broad authority to change. Even if the law was a statute of repose, they contend, the legislature can — and has before — revoked or amended such a provision.
“(Lawmakers) are the ultimate arbiter of what public policy is in the state of Maryland and here they have made their intent clear,” said Robert S. Peck, one of the victims’ lawyers, of the child victims law.
In passing the law in 2023, Peck said, the legislature sought to remedy a “longstanding injustice.” He cited the report released last April by the state attorney general documenting the results of a four-year investigation of decades of child sexual abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.
Investigators uncovered evidence of 156 clergy and other church officials having tormented more than 600 children and young adults, as far back as the 1940s. Some survivors credited the report with providing momentum for lawmakers in Annapolis to push the child victims law, for which they’d advocated for years, over the finish line.
“Providing justice to those victims for their childhood experience,” Peck said in court, “is clearly something the legislature can do.”
Faced with the prospect of scores of lawsuits, the Baltimore diocese declared bankruptcy on the eve of the Child Victims Act taking effect. Those court proceedings are expected to take years, with people who say they were abused by those affiliated with the Baltimore diocese having until May 31 to file claims in bankruptcy court.
Although attorneys from the office of Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown did not participate in the hearing Wednesday, they previously submitted a brief in the Prince George’s County lawsuit supporting the survivors’ position that the child victims law is constitutional.
“The General Assembly has broad authority to modify time restrictions for filing lawsuits, and the archdiocese cites no case in which a Maryland court has found the General Assembly to have exceeded that authority,” Brown’s office wrote. “Further, there is no basis to conclude that the General Assembly ever intended to create a ‘vested right’ for the enablers of child sex abuse to avoid civil liability for their actions.”
According to scholars, the only other statute of repose in Maryland is in the construction industry. It protects the likes of builders and architects from liability related to injuries sustained in structures they designed and built after a certain amount of time passes following completion.
Under a statute of repose, the clock for lawsuits starts ticking when the building is deemed operational, rather than when a person is hurt. Statutes of limitations, on the other hand, start counting the period a person has to file a lawsuit from the time they sustain an injury.
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