Maryland's $60 Billion Reckoning: The Child Victims Act, Decades of Institutional Abuse, and an Unprepared State Treasury

Maryland is facing a fiscal and moral reckoning unlike anything in its modern history. The Maryland Child Victims Act of 2023 — the product of sixteen years of failed legislative attempts and the personal courage of a survivor-turned-lawmaker — has opened a permanent legal window for survivors of childhood sexual abuse to seek accountability from the institutions that failed to protect them. As of April 2026, 12,305 claims have been filed against state government entities alone. Depending on how courts resolve a critical legal question about multiple incidents of abuse, Maryland's liability could range from $4.9 billion to as much as $60 billion — approaching the state's entire annual budget. Not a single dollar has been set aside to pay those claims.

A Number That Stops You Cold

MA7E171 small Sixty billion dollars. That figure, articulated on the floor of the Maryland Senate by Republican Senator Chris West, reflects what Maryland could theoretically owe survivors of childhood sexual abuse at state-run juvenile detention facilities if plaintiffs prevail on a central legal question: whether each separate incident of abuse — not each victim — triggers a separate damages cap under the original Maryland Child Victims Act.

The math is stark. The Maryland Attorney General's office confirmed in April 2026 that 12,305 claims have been filed against state government entities. If those claimants were abused on average ten separate occasions during confinement — a plausible estimate given that many were incarcerated for months or years — and each incident supports a separate $890,000 recovery under the original law's "per incident or occurrence" language, the arithmetic reaches approximately $60 billion. Maryland's total annual budget for fiscal year 2027 is roughly $70.8 billion.

Even the conservative floor estimate is staggering. Multiplying 12,305 claims by the revised $400,000 per-claimant cap that took effect June 1, 2025, yields a baseline liability of $4.9 billion. The state has not disclosed a funding mechanism for any scenario. The Comptroller's 2025 annual report acknowledged that the state has not accrued a loss contingency related to the CVA because "the amount is not currently estimable." Senate Budget Chair Guy Guzzone told reporters: "There is no money in the budget for that this year."

Behind those numbers are not abstractions. They are people — now adults — who were sent to state facilities as children and were sexually abused by staff and, in some cases, by other youth. Many were Black children, sent to facilities that were documented as dangerous for decades. Many reported abuse and were silenced. Some were threatened with longer sentences if they spoke. The Child Victims Act is, at its core, their legal right to say: this happened, someone is responsible, and I deserve to be heard in a court of law.

Sixteen Years of Trying: The Legislative History of the CVA

The Maryland Child Victims Act did not arrive quickly or easily. Its legislative lineage spans sixteen years, nine General Assembly sessions, and one lawmaker's extraordinary personal commitment to a cause rooted in his own survival.

The first precursor bill was introduced in 2007 by Democratic state Senator James Brochin of Baltimore County. It was rejected by the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee amid lobbying from the Maryland Catholic Conference. A bill introduced the following year by Delegate Eric Bromwell was withdrawn under pressure from his alma mater, Calvert Hall College High School, whose president warned of enrollment consequences from potential abuse lawsuits.

In 2015, Delegate C.T. Wilson of Charles County introduced his first version of the bill, and in doing so testified publicly that he had been repeatedly raped and beaten by his adoptive father between the ages of nine and fifteen — abuse he had not recognized as abuse until he was forty years old. That testimony placed the human cost of the statute of limitations on the record, in the delegate's own words. The bill received no hearing.

What followed was a cycle of passage and failure that tested Wilson's resolve repeatedly. In 2017, a partial reform was signed into law — extending the filing deadline to age 38 — but a lobbyist for the Maryland Catholic Conference quietly inserted a statute of repose provision that capped any future increase at age 38. That provision went unnoticed until 2019. Wilson's 2019 bill, the Hidden Predator Act, passed the House 135–3 but died in the Senate in a 5–5 committee tie. His 2020 version passed the House 127–0, then expired when COVID-19 cut the session short. His 2021 attempt was withdrawn after a former Senate Judiciary chairman — who had by then become a lobbyist for the Maryland Catholic Conference — testified against it.

The decisive shift came in November 2022. The Maryland Attorney General released a 456-page report documenting abuse of more than 600 children by 156 clergy and other personnel in the Archdiocese of Baltimore — a document whose scope and specificity removed any remaining doubt about the need for a remedy. Wilson pre-filed House Bill 1 on November 16, 2022, before the legislative session had even formally begun.

The bill that became the Maryland Child Victims Act of 2023 passed the House 132–2 and the Senate 42–5. Governor Wes Moore signed it on April 11, 2023 — his first bill signing as governor. At the ceremony, Wilson said he "never thought God would let me see this moment." The Maryland Catholic Conference had spent $209,939 lobbying against the bill between November 2022 and May 2023, according to records analyzed by the Baltimore Sun.

What the Law Actually Does

The Maryland Child Victims Act — codified at Md. Code, Courts and Judicial Proceedings §§ 5-117, 5-303, 5-518, and 12-303 — is a civil law only. It does not change MAA1D21 small criminal statutes of limitations for child sexual abuse. What it does, in unambiguous terms, is eliminate every prior time limit on civil claims.

The key provision states that "notwithstanding any time limitation under a statute of limitations, a statute of repose, the Maryland Tort Claims Act, the Local Government Tort Claims Act, or any other law," a civil action for damages arising from childhood sexual abuse "may be filed at any time." That language superseded the prior age-38 deadline, the hidden statute of repose, and any other procedural barrier that previously blocked survivors from court.

The law permanently opens the courthouse doors, retroactively and prospectively. Claims for abuse that occurred decades ago are now actionable on the same basis as claims for recent abuse. Survivors can sue not only the direct perpetrator but any institution — school, church, state agency, civic organization — that knowingly allowed the abuse to occur or failed to take reasonable steps to prevent it. One provision bars posthumous claims: if a survivor who could have filed under the CVA dies before filing, the right does not transfer to their heirs.

As originally enacted, the law raised the damages caps for childhood sexual abuse claims significantly above the general government tort cap. The standard Maryland Tort Claims Act cap at the time was $400,000. The CVA elevated the cap specifically for sexual abuse claims against public entities — state agencies, local governments, and school boards — to $890,000. The cap applied "to a single claimant for injuries arising from a single incident or occurrence." For private institutions such as churches and private schools, the law set a $1.5 million cap on noneconomic damages per claimant for previously time-barred claims.

The 2025 Amendment: Cutting the Caps in Half

Within two years of the CVA's enactment, the scale of the claims it generated — and the legal question of what "per incident or occurrence" actually meant in facilities where children were abused repeatedly over extended confinement — alarmed legislators on both sides of the aisle. In early 2025, after the Maryland Supreme Court upheld the law's constitutionality, lawmakers moved to amend it.

In a development that carried significant symbolic weight, it was Delegate C.T. Wilson himself who introduced the amendment bill. Wilson later said he had initially agreed to the bill "after having read its title" without fully grasping its scope, and committed to rewriting it before it advanced. The revised House Bill 1378 made four significant changes to the CVA: it reduced the government defendant cap from $890,000 to $400,000 for claims filed after June 1, 2025; it reduced the private institution cap from $1.5 million to $700,000; it replaced the phrase "per incident or occurrence" with "per claim or claims," eliminating the legal basis for multiplying the cap across multiple incidents; and it capped attorney fees at 20% of settlements and 25% of court judgments.

Governor Moore signed HB 1378 on April 22, 2025. The bill passed the Senate 36–7 and the House 92–40 — notably narrower margins than the near-unanimous passage of the original CVA, reflecting the deepening political tension between survivor advocates and fiscal managers.

The "per incident" to "per claimant" shift is not a minor technical change. For many survivors at state juvenile facilities — where abuse occurred not once but repeatedly across months or years — the difference between those two standards is the difference between a damages ceiling of $890,000 and a damages ceiling that could multiply across every documented incident. Plaintiffs' attorneys argue that survivors who filed before June 1, 2025, under the original "per incident" language are not subject to the new restriction. How courts resolve that argument will materially shape the state's total financial exposure.

What the amendment did immediately was trigger a filing rush. Over 3,800 individuals filed lawsuits in April and May 2025 to lock in their claims under the original, higher cap structure. Baltimore City Circuit Court — which received nearly 1,300 new CVA cases in those compressed weeks — was overwhelmed. On June 2, 2025, the court imposed a temporary stay on all CVA suits to allow the development of case management procedures. The stay was lifted in October 2025, approximately five months later.

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The Institutions at the Center

Cheltenham Youth Detention Center: A History That Begins in 1870

No state facility appears more frequently in CVA litigation than Cheltenham Youth Detention Center in Prince George's County, and no facility carries a longer or more troubling history. Cheltenham was established in 1870 as the House of Reformation and Instruction for Colored Children — the first juvenile detention facility for Black boys in the Southern United States. Opened in January 1873 on a 1,200-acre tract purchased by Baltimore businessman Enoch Pratt, it was built to receive boys "deemed incorrigible, vicious, or vagrant or lacking proper care." Many had committed no crime.

A Capital News Service investigation published in December 2025, drawing on death records and archival sources, documented approximately 177 recorded deaths of incarcerated youth at the facility between 1877 and 1941 — with Senator William C. Smith Jr. estimating the total deaths at approximately 300, most buried in unmarked graves in wooded sections adjacent to the grounds. Tuberculosis was the official cause in 57% of examined cases, with exhaustion cited as a contributing factor in deaths involving pre-pubescent boys. A 1934 Child Welfare League of America investigation found the facility endangered health through overcrowding. A 1935 grand jury described an institution where boys were "ruled almost entirely by fear."

Boys at Cheltenham were contracted out under a convict leasing system — working six days a week for private families and businesses, in some cases "paroled to service" and required to work until age 21 with no compensation. The comparable facility for white boys, the House of Refuge, received substantially better funding. Racial integration of Maryland's juvenile facilities did not formally occur until 1960.

The state took over Cheltenham in 1937, renamed it several times, and continued to operate it — and the documented abuse did not stop. In 1991, nurse Jean Castle was indicted on charges of sexually abusing 16 boys during less than two months of employment. In the same year, a counselor was arrested for child sexual abuse after molesting a detained youth. In 1995, a national campaign identified Cheltenham as among the worst juvenile detention centers in the country. In 1999, state investigators fired seven employees for physical abuse, while simultaneously revealing more than 200 incidents related to suicide attempts and numerous sexual assaults by guards. In 2002, a guard was charged with a weeks-long sexual relationship with a 14-year-old detainee. In 2004, four staff members were criminally charged for assaulting a restrained youth whose pants were torn down.

In April 2004, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a formal findings letter — following an investigation conducted the previous year — concluding that conditions at Cheltenham and the adjacent Charles H. Hickey Jr. School violated the constitutional and federal statutory rights of confined juveniles. The DOJ found physical abuse by staff, excessive use of isolation, sexual abuse and inappropriate staff-youth relationships, and what it described as "a culture of secrecy and retaliation" that made it difficult for youth to report abuse. In June 2005, the DOJ and Maryland entered into a formal settlement agreement requiring reforms. The facilities were released from DOJ monitoring in 2008, but additional investigations in 2010 documented continuing systemic problems.

Within one month of the CVA taking effect in October 2023, more than 60 survivors had already filed claims against the state arising from Cheltenham. As of December 2025, more than 10,000 people are suing the Department of Juvenile Services across all its facilities — making DJS the most-sued state agency under the CVA. Abuse allegations in the lawsuits span from 1969 to 2017. One plaintiff described being sexually assaulted seven separate times in the mid-1990s by guards.

Charles H. Hickey Jr. School: 95 Criminal Counts

The Charles H. Hickey Jr. School in Baltimore County — formerly the Maryland Training School for Boys — was named alongside Cheltenham in the 2004 DOJ investigation and is the subject of more CVA claims than any other individual facility. The DOJ report found the same pattern: staff beating and punching juveniles, a documented culture of abuse, and institutional indifference to reports from detained youth.

The school's treatment program was closed in 2005. The facility continues to operate as a detention center. In January 2026, former Hickey employee Ronald Neverdon, 79 years old, was indicted on 95 criminal charges related to the alleged sexual abuse of 10 children between 1968 and 1989 — a parallel criminal case running alongside the civil CVA claims. Attorneys who track CVA litigation report that more than half of their juvenile detention caseloads involve the Hickey School.

Backbone Mountain Youth Center: The Highest Rate in the Nation

A Bureau of Justice Statistics report covering the 2009–2010 period identified the Backbone Mountain Youth Center in Swanton, Garrett County, as having the highest rate of sexual abuse of any juvenile detention facility in the United States. According to the survey, 36.4% of youth confined there reported experiencing sexual victimization — three times the national average of 12%. The then-Secretary of the Department of Juvenile Services told a Senate committee the findings were "flawed or full of exaggerated and false information." Backbone Mountain is now subject to CVA litigation from former residents.

Waxter and the Broader DJS System

The Thomas J.S. Waxter Children's Center, a former facility for female youth, is also named extensively in CVA litigation. In June 2025, three plaintiffs — survivors of abuse at Waxter and Hickey — filed a federal civil rights lawsuit seeking $300 million in damages, a claim not subject to the state statutory caps because it was filed in federal rather than state court. Levy Konigsberg, one of the leading law firms in this litigation, had filed on behalf of nearly 500 DJS abuse survivors across 15 facilities by early 2026. The lawsuits collectively allege that the State of Maryland hired unqualified and unscreened staff, failed to investigate abuse complaints, maintained a culture of secrecy and retaliation, and had ample notice — through state audits, federal investigations, criminal prosecutions, and media coverage spanning decades — that these facilities were dangerous.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore: The Report That Changed Everything

The political catalyst that finally broke the logjam in Annapolis was not a lawsuit, a court ruling, or a legislative compromise. It was a document: the Maryland Attorney General's 456-page report on clergy abuse in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, released April 5, 2023, six days before Governor Moore signed the CVA.

The report — produced by a four-year investigation launched in 2018 by then-AG Brian Frosh and completed under AG Anthony Brown — reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents dating to the 1940s and drew on interviews with more than 300 individuals who contacted the office directly. Its findings were sweeping: 156 clergy, deacons, and other personnel credibly accused of abuse; more than 600 documented child victims from the 1940s through 2002; the report notes the true number is likely significantly higher. At St. Mark parish in Catonsville, 11 abusive priests served between 1964 and 2004.

The report documented not only abuse but concealment — systematic transfer of accused priests to new parishes without explanation, removal for "treatment" out of state while access to children continued, and failure to report to law enforcement. Cardinal William Keeler, who served as Archbishop from 1989 to 2007, was identified in an earlier Pennsylvania Grand Jury report for covering up abuse while Bishop of Harrisburg and for transferring an accused priest to Baltimore, where abuse continued.

Two days before the CVA took effect — on September 29, 2023 — the Archdiocese of Baltimore filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in federal court, halting all individual CVA lawsuits against it and routing claims through the bankruptcy process. Archbishop Lori attributed the filing directly to the CVA. The bankruptcy court set May 31, 2024 as the bar date for survivor claims; approximately 922 unique survivor claims were filed.

The bankruptcy proceedings have not moved smoothly. In October 2025, the Archdiocese proposed a $33 million settlement fund — approximately $33,000 per survivor — which survivors rejected as "insulting." Survivors had been seeking approximately $1 million each. In December 2025, the Archdiocese dropped its charitable immunity defense, which it had previously deployed as a potential shield against liability. As of April 2026, Hartford Insurance has proposed a $100 million settlement plan that requires both court approval and agreement on a reorganization plan. The case remains in active proceedings.

The Archdiocese of Washington, D.C. — which includes five Maryland counties — has faced its own CVA challenges. In July 2025, a Maryland court ruled that charitable immunity blocked a survivor from suing the Archdiocese of Washington, a ruling that CHILD USA, a University of Pennsylvania think tank focused on child protection law, described as an exception that "carves a dangerous gap" into the CVA's purpose for clergy abuse survivors.

The Foster Care System: A Third Consecutive Unsatisfactory Audit

While the juvenile detention facility cases have drawn the most attention under the CVA, Maryland's foster care system presents its own crisis of accountability. A state audit released in September 2025 — the third consecutive unsatisfactory audit of the Social Services Administration since 2017 — revealed failures that carry both fiscal and human consequences.

The audit found seven registered sex offenders living at approved guardianship homes housing ten children as of August 2024. A group foster care worker hired in December 2022 had a 2014 conviction for sexually assaulting a minor; he was later charged with new crimes involving children in his care. The state's Office of Licensing and Monitoring had reviewed the facility in April 2023 and failed to flag the background. As of the audit period, 280 children were housed in hotels under unlicensed vendors, some for as long as two years, at daily costs reaching $1,259 per child — more than four times the cost of licensed treatment foster care. Twenty-five percent of children had not received a required medical examination in the prior year.

The audit findings are not merely administrative failures. Under the CVA, survivors of abuse in foster care settings can file claims against the Maryland Department of Human Services and its Social Services Administration, against licensed foster care agencies, and against residential treatment facilities. A lawsuit already filed under the CVA names Baltimore City DSS as defendant, alleging that the agency — acting as a legal parent substitute — failed in its duty of care toward children placed with a foster parent who allegedly abused them over nearly a decade. As of early 2026, Maryland lawmakers were actively considering withholding at least $750,000 from DHS in response to the persistent audit failures.

Public Schools: From Baltimore to Owings Mills

MA7E171 small CVA claims have reached across Maryland's public and private school systems as well. In June 2025, three women sued Baltimore City Public Schools over abuse by former special education teacher Alvin Hunt at Calverton Junior High School. Hunt worked at the school from 1975 to 2005, then returned as a substitute from 2010 to 2019. Plaintiffs allege he was one of four male teachers who preyed on students, that his conduct was observed by other staff who took no action, and that one plaintiff became pregnant at age 14 as a result of rape while Hunt remained employed at the school.

The Harford County Board of Education was one of three institutional defendants in the constitutional challenge that reached the Maryland Supreme Court. The board argued that the CVA's retroactive application created an impermissible financial burden; the court rejected that argument and upheld the law. Private schools have not been exempt: Key School in Annapolis is party to the constitutional challenge, after a survivor filed suit alleging abuse by two teachers between 1973 and 1977. McDonogh School in Owings Mills faced a 2019 internal investigation that identified five former faculty members as having sexually assaulted 24 students over several decades; in March 2025, more than a dozen former students filed CVA lawsuits. Calvert Hall College High School — the institution whose pressure helped kill the 2008 precursor bill — is itself now a defendant, facing lawsuits filed on behalf of 19 former students alleging abuse between 1969 and 1990 by multiple clergy named in the 2023 AG report.

County boards of education are subject to the same caps as other government entities — $890,000 per incident for pre-June 2025 filings, or $400,000 per claimant for filings after June 1, 2025. The Maryland Association of Boards of Education had noted 18 pending CVA claims in its shared insurance pool as of early 2025, with 50 to 70 more expected.

The Fiscal Reckoning: $4.9 Billion to $60 Billion

Maryland's structural fiscal position was already under significant stress before the CVA liability wave became a defined number. The state closed a $3.3 billion FY 2026 deficit through a combination of tax increases, spending cuts, and fund reallocations. The Department of Legislative Services projected a $1.4 billion FY 2027 shortfall — nearly five times the figure projected the prior spring. By FY 2028, the gap widens to roughly $3.1 billion. By FY 2031, structural deficits are projected to approach $4 billion, driven substantially by costs associated with the Blueprint for Maryland's Future education mandate, which is expected to exceed $3.7 billion annually by that year. Even with the Rainy Day Fund at approximately 8% of revenues, ongoing revenues are expected to cover only about 89% of continuing spending by FY 2030.

Against that backdrop, the CVA liability sits as what financial analysts would call an off-balance-sheet contingent liability — a massive potential obligation that does not appear as a line item in budget documents, has not been disclosed to credit rating agencies in specific terms, and has no dedicated funding source. "It would be inappropriate to say we are setting aside some amount of money," Senate President Bill Ferguson told reporters in April 2026. "That would also influence the settlement negotiations." He indicated that settlements, when they come, would be paid over time rather than as a lump sum. House Minority Whip Justin Ready put it more bluntly: "There is no money set aside right now... It's all going to come from the taxpayers."

The liability range breaks down as follows. At the low end, 12,305 claimants multiplied by the revised $400,000 cap — applicable to claims filed after June 1, 2025 — yields $4.9 billion. At the original $890,000 cap applied to all 12,305 claimants (one incident per claimant), the figure reaches approximately $10.9 billion. Senator West's $60 billion estimate assumes an average of ten incidents per claimant at $890,000 per incident. The state has not resolved the legal question of which framework applies, and courts have not issued definitive rulings on how to treat serial, repeat abuse by the same perpetrators at state facilities. As the Maryland Attorney General's office acknowledged to Spotlight on Maryland, the majority of the 12,305 claims were filed before June 1, 2025, meaning most claimants retain legal arguments under the original "per incident" language.

On May 14, 2025, Moody's Investors Service downgraded Maryland's general obligation bond rating from Aaa to Aa1 — the first downgrade in more than 50 years. Moody's cited economic and financial underperformance compared to other triple-A states, vulnerability to federal employment policy shifts, and elevated fixed costs. The CVA's potential liabilities are not explicitly cited in Moody's public rationale; investigative reporting by Spotlight on Maryland found that the liabilities "do not appear as clearly defined line items in the most recently published fiscal planning documents reviewed by credit rating agencies" and that ratings analysts were briefed on the issue only "in general terms" during Annapolis meetings approximately two years before the downgrade. Fitch and Standard & Poor's have maintained their AAA ratings. But the absence of a formal CVA reserve — and the potential for tens of billions in unaccrued obligations — represents an ongoing credit risk if rating agencies begin to assign it the weight the numbers suggest it warrants.

What Other States Have Learned

Maryland is not the first state to confront the fiscal consequences of opening the courthouse doors for childhood sexual abuse survivors. The experiences of New MAB5F71 small York, California, and New Jersey — each of which passed comparable legislation between 2019 and 2020 — offer both cautionary precedents and practical models for managing what comes next.

New York: Ten Thousand Claims and a 30-Year Bond

New York's Child Victims Act was signed in February 2019 and opened a lookback window that ran, after a COVID extension, through August 2021. More than 10,000 civil suits were filed during that window. New York City settled more than 150 CVA actions at a cost exceeding $160 million as of October 2024; 135 of those settlements involved the New York City Department of Education. One jury awarded $30 million at the first fully-defended CVA trial in New York state history, with $20 million of that in punitive damages. Catholic dioceses across the state have faced waves of bankruptcy filings: the Diocese of Rochester settled for $246 million, the Diocese of Syracuse for $176 million, and the Diocese of Albany for $148 million, among others. The Archdiocese of New York — which avoided bankruptcy — pledged $300 million for approximately 1,300 pending claims in December 2025, with plans to sell its Manhattan headquarters to help fund that commitment.

To address the financial strain on school districts — roughly one-third of which face CVA claims — Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation in November 2025 allowing districts to issue bonds for up to 30 years to pay judgments or settlements from CVA lawsuits. The previous bond term ceiling was 15 years. The purpose is explicit: spread the cost across generations of taxpayers rather than forcing immediate cuts to educational programs. New York's approach illustrates that long-term structured payment mechanisms are available, but require political will and legislative authorization to deploy.

California: $4.8 Billion and an Insurance Crisis

California's AB 218 opened a three-year lookback window from January 2020 to December 2022. By the end of 2024, California's school districts had paid approximately $700 million in settlements, with more than 500 cases still pending and projections suggesting total district payouts could reach $3 billion. Los Angeles Unified alone paid more than $211 million. The most significant event came in April 2025, when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a $4 billion settlement with more than 7,000 claimants alleging abuse at county juvenile detention facilities and foster care placements dating to 1959. In October 2025, the county added $828 million more to cover 415 additional claimants, bringing the total potential payout to approximately $4.8 billion — the largest institutional child sexual abuse settlement in United States history.

California's experience also illustrates a secondary consequence that Maryland has not yet fully confronted: an insurance crisis. The Schools Excess Liability Fund, a shared risk pool covering more than half of California's 1,100-plus school districts, has issued special assessments totaling approximately $595 million. Reinsurers have stopped working with the fund. Individual district premiums have risen by 70% or more in three years. Districts that were never sued directly face surcharges because the shared pool covers those that were. Maryland's own insurance picture — and how it covers DJS, the Department of Human Services, and county school boards against CVA claims — has not been publicly addressed.

New Jersey: The First Trial Against the State

New Jersey's Child Victims Act opened a two-year lookback window from December 2019 to November 2021. In March 2024, a jury returned the first verdict against the State of New Jersey in a CVA trial — awarding $25 million to a survivor who had been abused in three separate foster homes between 1990 and 1993 while under the supervision of the state's Division of Youth and Family Services. The jury found DYFS 99% liable. In January 2026, a Newark school district was ordered to pay $30 million following a trial involving abuse by a staff member beginning when the plaintiff was in third grade. In March 2026, the New Jersey Supreme Court — in a 6–1 ruling — held that the CVA eliminated governmental immunity from vicarious liability for teacher sexual abuse occurring outside the scope of employment, a decision legal experts described as a "game changer" likely to affect nearly every pending CVA case against public entities in the state.

New Hampshire: A Compensation Fund Model

New Hampshire's experience is instructive as a potential alternative framework. Following 1,500-plus claims of abuse at state-run Youth Development Center juvenile facilities, New Hampshire created the first administrative compensation fund of its kind in the nation in May 2022, initially funded with $100 million. Sexual abuse claims were eligible for compensation up to $1.5 million per victim; the average compensation reached approximately $540,000. The fund allowed survivors to receive payment without protracted litigation — a model that several commentators have suggested Maryland might consider adopting for at least a portion of its DJS claims. A single jury verdict outside the fund reached $38 million, though the award was reduced to $475,000 by the state's damages cap pending further constitutional review.

The Constitutional Battle

The CVA's constitutionality was never a settled question. Defendants, led by the Archdiocese of Washington, challenged the law almost immediately after it took MARYLA4 small effect, arguing that the 2017 statute's hidden statute of repose had created a vested right that the 2023 law could not retroactively extinguish.

Maryland's lower courts split. In March 2024, Prince George's County Circuit Court upheld the CVA's constitutionality. In April 2024, Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Jeannie E. Cho ruled the law unconstitutional, finding it violated the Maryland Declaration of Rights. The Maryland Supreme Court accepted the consolidated cases — which included the Archdiocese of Washington lawsuit, the Harford County Board of Education challenge, and a case brought by Annapolis's Key School. On February 3, 2025, in a 4–3 decision, Chief Justice Matthew J. Fader wrote the majority opinion holding that the 2017 law was "an ordinary statute of limitations, not a statute of repose" and was therefore properly superseded by the 2023 CVA. The ruling removed the last constitutional barrier to the law's enforcement.

The three dissenting justices would have reached a different conclusion, and the closeness of the ruling underscores how genuinely contested the constitutional questions were. Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, who had championed the law in 2023 and defended it before the Supreme Court, called the ruling a confirmation that "the passage of time will not prevent survivors from seeking justice for sexual abuse they suffered as children."

What Comes Next

With the constitutional questions settled and the Baltimore City Circuit Court stay lifted in October 2025, the civil cases are advancing — though "advancing" in a wave of 12,000-plus claims means years of litigation before any global resolution is in sight. Plaintiffs' attorneys and the state are organizing bellwether trials — a small, representative set of cases whose outcomes are intended to guide settlement negotiations for the broader pool. The results of those early trials will be closely watched: a verdict in the range of the $25 million awarded in New Jersey's first state-agency CVA trial, applied across thousands of Maryland claims, would accelerate pressure toward a structured settlement framework.

The unresolved legal question about "per incident" versus "per claimant" recovery is the most consequential variable in the state's financial exposure. If courts rule that each documented incident of abuse at a juvenile facility constitutes a separate occurrence under the original cap — as plaintiffs' attorneys for the pre-June 2025 filers contend — the arithmetic moves decisively toward the higher end of the liability range. If courts rule that the cap applies once per claimant regardless of the number of incidents, the math changes substantially. That question has not been definitively resolved, and the state has not yet offered a definitive legal position on it.

No global settlement framework exists. Senate Judiciary Chairman William C. Smith Jr., the original Senate sponsor of the CVA, told reporters he is "optimistic that the attorney general and the plaintiffs can collaborate to reach a settlement," but no formal negotiating structure has been announced. The Maryland Catholic Conference has noted, pointedly, that "the Maryland state government now appears to be the largest employer of child sex abusers in the state" — a statement that, whatever its rhetorical purpose, reflects the scale of what the litigation has uncovered.

For survivors, the uncertainty is not abstract. They have waited — in some cases, more than five decades — for a legal mechanism that finally acknowledged what happened to them. Many are now in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. Some have died before filing, and under the CVA's no-posthumous-claims provision, their cases died with them. The Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assault observed after the 2025 amendment: "Helping people who were sexually abused while in state custody doesn't require a lawsuit, but it will require more resources." The state has not yet answered what those resources will look like, where they will come from, or when they will arrive.

The number that demands attention — whether $4.9 billion, $10.9 billion, or $60 billion — is not primarily a fiscal problem. It is a ledger of harm. Every claim represents a child who was sent to a place the state was responsible for, abused in a place the state knew was dangerous, and silenced in a place that had been told to stop. The money, when it comes, will not undo any of that. But the accounting is, at last, beginning.

If You Are Concerned About a Child

If you are concerned that a child may be experiencing abuse or neglect, please do not wait. You do not need proof — you only need reasonable concern. Reports made in good faith are protected by law.

If a child is in immediate danger, call 911.
Maryland Child Protective Services Hotline: To report suspected abuse within Maryland, contact the Department of Social Services statewide hotline at 1-800-91Prevent (1-800-917-7383), available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Outside of Maryland — Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline: Call or text 1-800-422-4453 (1-800-4-A-CHILD), available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: Call or text 988 for mental health crisis support.

Reporting abuse can protect a child. Remember, you do not need to be certain that abuse is occurring — if you have concerns, reach out. Trained professionals will assess the situation and take appropriate steps.

If you are a survivor of childhood abuse and are struggling with its effects, support is available. Healing is possible, and you deserve to access it.