A June 23 ruling gave the state a narrow legal win on a 1970s abuse claim — and, in the process, spelled out exactly how exposed Maryland’s budget already is to a liability lawmakers have spent three straight sessions declining to fund.
By Michael Phillips | MDBayNews
Maryland’s Supreme Court handed the state a win on June 23 — and used the occasion to hand the General Assembly a bill nobody in Annapolis has figured out how to pay.
The case, Bd. of Education for Wicomico County v. Sturm, is narrow on its face. Rhonda Sturm alleges a teacher abused her at a Wicomico County elementary school between 1967 and 1971. The Wicomico County Board of Education argued sovereign immunity: the state didn’t authorize school boards to carry liability insurance for claims like hers until July 1, 1971 — months after her allegations end — so there was never a mechanism to pay a judgment on conduct before that date. Chief Justice Matthew Fader, writing for a unanimous court, agreed. Sturm’s case was dismissed without prejudice; she can refile only if the legislature someday builds a way to pay claims like hers.
The Court effectively wrote the fix into its own opinion and left it on lawmakers’ desks.
The Court didn’t pretend this was a satisfying outcome. It found that the Board’s underlying obligation to compensate Sturm was real, but that the state itself never created the financial plumbing to honor it — and only the General Assembly can build that plumbing now. Two attorneys who’ve represented Child Victims Act survivors put the same point more bluntly to The Daily Record after the ruling: the Court effectively wrote the fix into its own opinion and left it on lawmakers’ desks.
That’s the real story here, and it’s bigger than one plaintiff. Sturm is a preview of a reckoning Maryland has been deferring since 2023.
Sturm is a preview of a reckoning Maryland has been deferring since 2023.
A Law Passed Without a Way to Pay for It
The Child Victims Act, signed by Governor Wes Moore in April 2023, eliminated Maryland’s statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims against public and private institutions alike. It passed with overwhelming bipartisan support, and survivor advocates are right that it did something real: it opened a courthouse door that had been sealed on many victims for decades, some of them abused in the state’s own juvenile detention system.
What it didn’t do — and what nobody in Annapolis has done since — is identify how the state pays the resulting bill. More than 12,305 claims have now been filed against state government entities, the overwhelming majority tied to alleged abuse in Maryland’s juvenile justice system. The Maryland Attorney General’s Office told the Supreme Court in its own petition that pre-1982 claims alone — roughly 1,300 of the total — could expose the state to more than $1 billion.
Using the current $400,000 per-claim cap against public institutions, Spotlight on Maryland calculated the full claim volume could run at least $4.9 billion — a figure that excludes higher-value claims, federal cases exempt from the cap, and a separate legal dispute the Banner reports remains unresolved over whether survivors are entitled to compensation per incident rather than per claim.
That same unresolved dispute is why the numbers vary so widely depending on who’s doing the math: in January 2026, a Department of Legislative Services fiscal analyst told budget committees that, under the previous $890,000 cap in effect when most claims were filed, a full settlement of all claims could cost the state almost $10.7 billion. Legislators briefing reporters this spring, including Sen. Chris West (R-Baltimore/Carroll), have floated a worst-case figure as high as $60 billion if the per-incident theory prevails in court.
The General Assembly has taken exactly one concrete step to limit its own exposure: a 2025 amendment that cut the payout cap for claims against the state from $890,000 to $400,000 per claim, over objections from survivors’ attorneys who say the retroactive cap change is likely unconstitutional as applied to claims already filed. That’s a liability-management move, not a funding plan. Three budget cycles in, Maryland still has not built a reserve, a bond mechanism, or a claims-processing structure — the kind of dedicated vehicle other states have used to manage comparable exposure — to actually pay what it now owes.
Why Sturm Matters More Than Its Facts
Sturm’s own claim is about conduct from more than fifty years ago and turns on an insurance-authorization technicality specific to pre-1971 school abuse. Read narrowly, it’s a footnote. Read as a signal, it’s a preview of the fight that’s coming on the roughly 1,300 pre-1982 juvenile-facility claims — and, eventually, on the thousands of claims filed after that date, where the state’s sovereign-immunity defenses are weaker, but the dollar amounts are far larger.
The Court has now shown its hand twice on how it will rule when the state’s checkbook and a survivor’s claim collide.
The Court has now shown its hand twice on how it will rule when the state’s checkbook and a survivor’s claim collide: sympathy for the survivor, a real legal obligation acknowledged on the record, and immunity upheld anyway when the legislature never built a way to pay. Of the 200-plus motions to dismiss pre-1982 claims the state has already filed on sovereign-immunity grounds, at least four have been granted and at least 48 denied, according to the Attorney General’s own petition — meaning most of these fights are still live, and Sturm is the template the state will keep citing.
The Accountability Question Annapolis Keeps Deferring
Every year the legislature balances its budget without addressing CVA liability is a year the bill gets passed to the next General Assembly, the next governor, or the next credit rating review — Moody’s already downgraded Maryland’s credit rating in May 2025 for the first time in nearly three decades, and rating agencies have told state officials the CVA exposure has come up, in Senate President Bill Ferguson’s words, “in a general sense,” in meetings with analysts. That’s not a plan. It’s an acknowledgment that the problem exists, filed away for later.
Sturm gives Annapolis a legal roadmap it didn’t have before: the Supreme Court has now said, explicitly, that a funding mechanism is what stands between survivors and compensation the state itself doesn’t dispute they’re owed. The question for the legislative session ahead isn’t whether lawmakers know the bill is coming. Every budget hearing since March has made clear they do. The question is whether the state that moved with real urgency to open the courthouse door in 2023 will move with matching urgency to make good on what walks through it — or whether, three years and 12,000 claims later, Maryland keeps choosing not to decide.
Will Maryland move with matching urgency to make good on what walks through the courthouse door—or, three years and 12,000 claims later, keep choosing not to decide?
MDBayNews will track CVA-related budget language in the next legislative session, along with any funding mechanism the General Assembly proposes in response to the Sturm ruling.
Sources: This report draws on the full text of Bd. of Education for Wicomico County v. Sturm, No. 54, Sept. Term 2025 (Md., filed June 23, 2026), and the Maryland Attorney General’s petition for certiorari in that case, both published by the Maryland Judiciary. Budget and liability figures were drawn from reporting by Spotlight on Maryland (FOX45 News/WJLA/The Baltimore Sun), The Baltimore Banner, The Daily Record, and the Maryland Department of Legislative Services’ published budget projections. Legislative quotes attributed to Sen. Chris West, Senate Budget and Taxation Chair Guy Guzzone, Senate President Bill Ferguson, and Del. C.T. Wilson were reported contemporaneously by Spotlight on Maryland and The Baltimore Banner during 2026 budget proceedings; MDBayNews did not independently interview these officials for this piece.
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