Maryland Opened the Lawsuit Floodgates – With No Financial Lifeboat by Clayton Mitchell

In its anxiety to be seen doing something good, the Maryland General Assembly has managed to do something gravely disfiguring. What began as a noble effort to deliver long-overdue justice to survivors of institutional child sexual abuse has now become a cautionary tale in legislative vanity — a textbook example of what happens when lawmakers legislate emotion unmoored from economics.

I refer to the 2023 Child Victims Act, Maryland’s morally urgent and fiscally negligent decision to lift the statute of limitations for abuse claims. The law, passed with great fanfare and a flood of self-congratulation, created what Maryland Matters reporter Bryan P. Sears has since documented as a staggering wave of lawsuits — thousands of them — aimed not just at religious institutions, but at the State of Maryland itself.

The cost? Sears reports that conservative estimates place potential state liability around $4 billion, a figure that rivals Maryland’s already cavernous structural deficit. And the real number may be even higher. Attorneys representing survivors say they’re handling claims from over 4,500 clients — with hundreds, perhaps thousands, more expected.

And yet — stunningly — the Legislature provided no mechanism to pay for this moral reckoning. No appropriated fund. No revenue stream. No reserve. No roadmap. Just a massive, undisciplined release of legal liability, issued in a fit of legislative conscience, with the bill to be settled by future taxpayers.

Now, in a moment of panicked pragmatism, the General Assembly has passed House Bill 1378, which slashes damage caps and narrows victims’ rights before the fiscal hemorrhage becomes uncontrollable. Governor Wes Moore has said he will sign it, noting the need to “preserve the long-term fiscal stability of the state.” As if this consideration — curiously absent when the law was first passed — had only recently presented itself.

Sears, who has provided indispensable coverage of this evolving crisis, noted that attorneys for victims are now racing to file lawsuits before the new, reduced caps take effect on June 1. Robert K. Jenner, one of those attorneys, called the new law a betrayal of the survivors Maryland had once promised to support. “It breaks the faith,” Jenner said, with “thousands of survivors who believed the state was on their side.”

Indeed it does. The state extended its hand to victims and invited them to come forward — and now, discovering that it may have bankrupted its conscience, it is pulling that helping hand back.

Delegate C.T. Wilson, who sponsored both the original law and its subsequent limitation on damages compensation, expressed astonishment at the number of claims. “I could have never comprehended 4,500 claimants,” he told Sears. That statement, dripping with sincerity, should chill every Maryland taxpayer. It is an admission that the General Assembly created a multi-billion-dollar liability without the faintest grasp of its scope.

Meanwhile, it is not clear if the Wall Street bond rating agencies have yet to be formally advised of the full dimensions of this contingent liability — a liability that, were it sitting on a corporate balance sheet, would invite charges of concealment. For a state that worships at the altar of its AAA bond rating, this alleged omission, if true, may prove the most reckless move of all.

This is what happens when symbolism replaces statesmanship. When feelings outrun facts. When the impulse to seem good overpowers the obligation to do good well.

Conservatives, it should be said, do not oppose justice for victims. But they insist on justice that is honest, deliverable, and rooted in prudence. What Maryland has offered instead is a promissory note with no plan to pay — and is now scrambling to shrink the obligation before the ink is even dry. This is the soft tyranny of good intentions unanchored by practical reasoning.   Here, the soft tyranny has become a hard liability — and a bruising one for Maryland taxpayers.

Maryland made a promise. It failed to count the cost. And now, in full view of the victims it once embraced, it is preparing to default — not in legal terms, perhaps, but in moral ones. What began as an act of courage now ends in retreat, with justice rationed and accountability nowhere in sight.

Clayton A. Mitchell, Sr. is a life-long Eastern Shoreman, an attorney, and former Chairman of the Maryland Department of Labor’s Board of Appeals.  He is co-host of the Gonzales/Mitchell Show podcast that discusses politics, business, and cultural issues.