Cary J. Hansel

Twenty-Seven Hours in the Interrogation Room

Donna Zinetti was raped and murdered while jogging near her Laurel apartment in October 1999. Keith Longtin, her estranged husband, arrived at the scene after seeing news reports that a woman's body had been found. Prince George's County police already viewed him as a suspect, and they took him to the Landover station.

Detectives questioned him for roughly twenty-seven hours. They took his belt, wallet, shoelaces and telephone, showed him photographs of his wife's body, challenged his faith, and treated his answers to "what if" questions as a confession. Longtin said he asked for counsel and was deprived of meaningful sleep.

He was charged with first-degree murder. DNA excluded him within months, and the evidence pointed instead toward a serial rapist — yet the department did not promptly disclose what it had or secure his release. He spent more than eight months in jail. He missed his wife's funeral, lost his home and possessions, and was assaulted behind bars. The system that was supposed to find his wife's killer had, for the better part of a year, held her widower in its place.

Pattern and Practice under the Maryland Constitution

Longtin's civil case challenged both the detectives' conduct and Prince George's County's alleged pattern or practice of unconstitutional detention, coerced interrogation, and suppression of evidence. The county-custom theory treated what happened in the interrogation room as part of an institutional practice rather than an isolated encounter.

Because the County's own customs were part of causation, the jury heard evidence of other incidents. It found for Longtin on Maryland constitutional, conspiracy, false-imprisonment, emotional-distress and false-light theories, and the final judgment preserved $5.025 million in compensatory damages.

Cary Hansel argued the appeal in Maryland's highest court. The 2011 decision resolved three issues: county pattern-or-practice liability, when a false-imprisonment claim accrues, and the retroactivity of a later damages cap.

The court recognized a state constitutional cause of action modeled on municipal pattern-or-practice liability — plaintiffs could now prove that local-government policy or custom caused constitutional violations, rather than having every encounter treated as an isolated mistake. It held that for a false imprisonment ending before trial, the Local Government Tort Claims Act's 180-day notice period runs from release, not arrest — Longtin's notice was timely because it was measured from June 13, the day he finally walked out of custody. And it refused to apply a later statutory damages cap retroactively to a cause of action that accrued before the amendment, preserving the jury's award rather than shrinking it to a ceiling enacted afterward.

Together, the rulings allowed proof of unconstitutional county custom, measured Longtin's notice period from his release, and preserved the $5.025 million compensatory judgment from retroactive application of the later cap.

Cooper v. Rodriguez: Murder on the Prison Bus

In the early morning of February 2, 2005, Philip Parker Jr. was strangled by another prisoner on a Maryland transport bus carrying thirty-four inmates and five correctional officers. The officers sat only feet away. His killer had been sentenced, hours earlier, to life without parole for murdering a cellmate.

Parker's parents sued. After a twelve-day trial, the jury awarded $18.5 million — $10 million to Parker's estate, $7.5 million to his mother, $1 million to his father — finding three officers negligent and Sergeant Larry Cooper, the officer in charge of the bus, grossly negligent.

The trial court then took most of it away. It struck the gross-negligence finding as a matter of law, held the officers immune, and cut the award to $200,000 per claimant.

Hansel carried the family's case to Maryland's highest court. In 2015, in Cooper v. Rodriguez, the court held that an official found grossly negligent was not protected by common-law public-official immunity and reinstated the judgment against Cooper. Gross negligence — an intentional failure to perform a manifest duty in reckless disregard of the consequences — falls outside both Maryland Tort Claims Act immunity and common-law public-official immunity. The court did not require a separate "special relationship" exception.

A 2018 decision converted the holding into enforceable judgments: $200,000 against the State and $1.625 million against Cooper personally, giving effect to the restored gross-negligence finding.

The Twenty-Year-Old Who Refused the Gang

Daquan Wallace was a twenty-year-old pretrial detainee in Baltimore. He refused to join the Black Guerrilla Family, and his mother repeatedly warned detention officials that he was in danger.

The civil case alleged that guards left gang members behind during dinner movement, kept doors unlocked, and created the conditions for what followed. Wallace was beaten into a two-month coma. He emerged paralyzed, nonverbal, and dependent on lifelong care.

Hansel and Lawrence Greenberg tried the deliberate-indifference case. They had to prove that officials knew Wallace faced a substantial risk of harm and disregarded it. Custody removes a person's ability to choose where to sleep, whom to avoid, or when to leave; the government inherits the responsibility those choices would have discharged. The trial reconstructed the jail minute by minute — who knew of the threats, which detainees remained on the tier, which doors were open, which officers controlled movement, and where the assault could have been prevented or stopped sooner.

The jury awarded Wallace $25 million against the individual correctional defendants. In March 2023, Maryland's Board of Public Works approved a separate $7 million settlement by the State. The two resolutions provided substantial resources for Wallace's lifelong medical care, mobility, and communication needs.

Repairs with a Price

Women living in Baltimore public housing described maintenance employees demanding sex in exchange for repairs — heat, water, working fixtures, the things a tenant cannot safely go without. Whatever power the coercion had, it drew from the employees' control over whether those things got fixed.

Twenty-three named women sued four maintenance workers and the Housing Authority of Baltimore City. Hansel represented the residents, developing both the individual encounters and the broader questions: how repair requests were assigned, what supervisors knew, how complaints were handled, and whether the Authority's systems allowed the coercion to continue.

Before settlement discussions began, Hansel and co-counsel Hirsch required the housing commissioner to meet the women and tour their apartments. The decision-maker would not be permitted to value the case from behind a desk.

The case resolved for $8 million, with a claims process through which additional eligible women could participate without turning private experiences into public trials. The Housing Authority fired the accused workers, created fifty maintenance positions, introduced a computerized repair-request system, required continuing sexual-harassment training, and committed to clearing the backlog of neglected repairs. The original plaintiffs received vouchers allowing them to move. The settlement paired compensation with changes to the repair system and workplace practices implicated by the claims.

Gambrill: The Child Returned to School

A Dorchester County middle-school student endured repeated violent peer attacks and sustained two concussions. Her parents alleged that teachers and administrators knew the danger and failed to supervise. The trial court entered summary judgment for the school defendants, and the intermediate appellate court affirmed on a stack of protections: federal teacher-liability law, state immunity principles, and the educational-malpractice doctrine.

Hansel argued Gambrill v. Board of Education in Maryland's highest court, which reversed in 2022, taking the stack apart layer by layer. The Paul D. Coverdell Teacher Protection Act does not preempt Maryland's statute permitting negligence actions against school employees with board indemnification — the federal law contains an express exception for exactly that arrangement. And negligent supervision of physical safety is not "educational malpractice": a court does not have to evaluate anyone's teaching philosophy to decide whether staff responded reasonably to known assaults.

The reversal returned the family's negligence claims for trial on the full factual record.

Bella in the Yard

Heather Myers sued after an Elkton police officer fatally shot her family's dog, Bella, alleging an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment. The district court denied the officer qualified immunity because the material facts of the encounter were disputed, and the officer took an interlocutory appeal asking the Fourth Circuit to overturn that ruling before any trial.

Hansel and Ashton Zylstra represented Myers on appeal. On June 29, 2026, in Myers v. Devine, the Fourth Circuit affirmed.

A qualified-immunity appeal permits immediate review of legal questions, but it does not allow an appellate court to choose between competing accounts of disputed facts. The Fourth Circuit's affirmance left Bella's shooting on a trial path, with questions of distance, movement, warning, and threat reserved for the factfinder.

The Difference Between Limitations and Repose

Maryland's Child Victims Act of 2023 removed the time limits on civil claims arising from child sexual abuse, retroactively. Defendants facing revived claims argued that a 2017 statute had given them a vested right to be free of liability once the old deadline passed.

In 2025, Maryland's highest court rejected the argument by distinguishing a statute of limitations, which bars a remedy after a deadline while leaving the underlying claim intact, from a statute of repose, which extinguishes the claim itself. The court held that the 2017 provision was a limitations rule, so no vested right attached and the General Assembly could reopen the claims. Applying heightened rational-basis review, the court found a real and substantial relationship between the Act and evidence that survivors of child sexual abuse often need years, sometimes decades, before they can report or litigate what happened.

The Officer at the District Station

Hansel now leads a Baltimore City action brought under that Act.

His client alleges that in July 2006, when she was sixteen and being held at a Baltimore district station on an outstanding warrant, Officer William D. Welch used the threat of drug charges to coerce her and raped her in an interview room. The complaint identifies a report made promptly to the county officers who collected her, DNA evidence recovered afterwards, and Welch's later criminal case: he entered an Alford plea to misconduct in office in 2008, received a suspended sentence, and left the Baltimore Police Department.

The 2025 ruling allows the revived claim to proceed. Hansel has focused the civil case on the alleged history of sexual misconduct by officers and on what officials with authority knew and did in response. The limitations ruling supplies the procedural basis for litigating those allegations now.

The Ruling That Decides Who Decides

Hansel founded Hansel Law after years of civil-rights, government-liability, employment and appellate work. He has participated in more than twenty decided appeals, written the Appellate Watch column for a decade, and performed pro bono amicus work on questions extending beyond the immediate dispute. Outside the courtroom he has served as a legal observer, testified on police-force and disciplinary-record legislation, addressed Maryland's capital-punishment commission, and worked with community organizations on government accountability.

Hansel's appellate cases repeatedly concern what evidence a plaintiff may present and which decision-maker resolves the dispute. Longtin permitted proof of county policy and custom; Cooper placed gross negligence outside public-official immunity; Gambrill returned negligent-supervision claims involving physical safety to trial; Myers left disputed facts surrounding a police shooting to the factfinder; and the Child Victims Act decision allowed claims previously barred by limitations to proceed under the 2023 statute.