Cary J. Hansel

Pattern-and-Practice Liability under the Maryland Constitution

Keith Longtin spent more than eight months incarcerated for his wife’s murder after DNA excluded him and evidence pointed to another man. Cary J. Hansel represented Longtin in civil litigation challenging the interrogation, continued detention, suppression of exculpatory evidence, and Prince George’s County’s broader practices.

Hansel argued the case in Maryland’s highest court. The court recognized a state constitutional cause of action modeled on municipal pattern-or-practice liability and preserved a multimillion-dollar recovery. The decision allows plaintiffs to prove that local government policy or custom caused constitutional violations rather than treating each encounter as an isolated act.

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. His mother repeatedly warned detention officials that he faced danger.

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

Hansel and Lawrence Greenberg connected the prior warnings, housing decisions, door controls, staffing, officer conduct, and known gang threat to the state’s constitutional duty to protect Wallace.

Doors, Dinner, and Deliberate Indifference

Custody removes a person’s ability to choose where to sleep, whom to avoid, or when to leave. The government therefore assumes responsibility for responding to a substantial known risk of serious harm.

The Wallace trial reconstructed the jail minute by minute: who knew about the threats, which detainees remained on the tier, which doors were locked or open, which officers controlled movement, and when someone could have prevented or stopped the assault.

The jury awarded Wallace $25 million against individual correctional defendants. The amount reflected catastrophic past and future loss, including medical care, communication, mobility, and the ordinary autonomy a twenty-year-old expected to possess.

Jury Judgment and State Resolution

The jury verdict did not resolve every claim against every actor. Maryland later agreed to a separate $7 million settlement, approved by the Board of Public Works in March 2023.

The $25 million verdict and $7 million State agreement are distinct legal events. The first recorded a jury’s findings against individual defendants. The second resolved State-related claims through a public approval process. They cannot be added as though they were one undivided judgment.

Together, the verdict and settlement created a sworn record of the jail’s warnings, housing decisions, and controls while securing resources for Wallace’s continuing care.

Repairs with a Price

Women living in Baltimore public housing described maintenance employees demanding sex in exchange for repairs, utility restoration, or other services. The alleged coercion drew power from conditions the tenants could not safely ignore: broken fixtures, heat, water, housing stability, and employees’ control over the response.

Twenty-three named women sued four maintenance workers and the Housing Authority of Baltimore City. Hansel represented residents with Annie Hirsch and other co-counsel. Their work had to develop both individual encounters and the systemic questions surrounding complaints, supervision, discipline, and the use of public employment to obtain sexual access.

The case resolved through an $8 million settlement. It created compensation for the named plaintiffs and a process through which additional eligible women could present claims. No one was required to turn every private experience into a public trial in order to participate.

Twenty-Three Named Women and the Housing Authority

Each tenant had a different home condition, employee interaction, time period, injury, and decision about privacy.

The plaintiffs presented common evidence about how maintenance requests were assigned, what supervisors knew, how complaints were handled, and whether the housing authority’s systems allowed coercion to continue. They then presented evidence specific to each woman’s claim and allocation.

Hansel and Hirsch also required the housing commissioner to meet the women and tour their apartments before settlement discussions. 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 neglected repairs. The original plaintiffs received vouchers allowing them to move.

Gross Negligence Defeats Public-Official Immunity

Philip Parker Jr. was strangled during transport on a Maryland prison bus while correctional officers staffed the vehicle. Hansel represented Parker’s family in the Maryland Supreme Court after a jury found Sergeant Larry Cooper grossly negligent.

In 2015, Maryland’s highest court reinstated the judgment against Cooper and held that gross negligence falls outside both statutory and common-law public-official immunity. The resulting judgments were $200,000 against the State and $1.625 million against Cooper, while the published decision established an important limit on official immunity.

The Child Returned to School

A Dorchester County middle-school student endured repeated violent peer conflicts and sustained two concussions. Her parents alleged that teachers and administrators had notice of the danger and failed to provide reasonable supervision.

The trial court entered summary judgment for the school defendants. The intermediate appellate court affirmed, relying on federal teacher-protection law, state immunity principles, and the educational-malpractice doctrine.

Hansel argued Gambrill v. Board of Education in Maryland’s highest court. Hansel asked Maryland’s highest court whether the educational-malpractice doctrine could shield negligent supervision of a known physical danger from judicial review.

The State Negligence Claim Survived

The Maryland Supreme Court reversed in 2022. The Paul D. Coverdell Teacher Protection Act protects teachers from certain liability but does not preempt Maryland’s statute permitting negligence actions against school employees with board indemnification. The federal law contains an express exception for state laws that place employer-like liability on the governmental entity.

The court also held that negligent supervision of physical safety is not educational malpractice. Courts need not evaluate teaching philosophy or curriculum to determine whether staff responded reasonably to known assaults.

Material factual disputes required further proceedings. The appellate court allowed the family’s claims to continue without deciding negligence or damages.

Bella in the Yard

Heather Myers sued after Elkton police officer Anthony Devine fatally shot her family’s dog, Bella. The case alleged an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment and related claims.

The district court denied Devine qualified immunity because material facts about the encounter remained disputed. The officer filed an interlocutory appeal, asking the Fourth Circuit to overturn that ruling before trial.

Hansel and Ashton Zylstra represented Myers on appeal. On June 29, 2026, the Fourth Circuit dismissed factual challenges beyond its interlocutory jurisdiction and affirmed the legal portion of the immunity ruling.

An Appeal Cannot Rewrite the Facts

Qualified-immunity appeals permit immediate review of legal questions. They do not permit an appellate court to choose between competing accounts of what happened when the district court has identified genuine factual disputes.

The Fourth Circuit’s disposition kept Bella’s shooting on a trial path. It enforced the boundary between legal review and factual adjudication, preserving the disputed facts for the proceeding designed to resolve them.

For a plaintiff, preserving that boundary can determine whether witnesses, video, distance, movement, warnings, and alternatives are ever heard together by a jury.

Why the Child Victims Act Remained Constitutional

Maryland’s Child Victims Act of 2023 removed time limits for civil claims arising from child sexual abuse and applied retroactively. Organizations facing revived claims argued that a 2017 statute had created a vested right to be free from liability once the prior deadline expired.

Hansel participated on the survivor side in the consolidated constitutional litigation. In February 2025, the Maryland Supreme Court held that the 2017 provision was a statute of limitations, not a statute of repose.

A statute of limitations blocks a remedy after a designated period but does not extinguish the underlying cause of action. A statute of repose creates a substantive immunity after time runs. Because the earlier Maryland law was procedural, defendants acquired no vested property right that prevented the General Assembly from restoring access to court.

Protecting the Right to Bring the Case

The court applied heightened rational-basis review and found a real and substantial relationship between the Act and the problem of delayed disclosure of child sexual abuse. The law responded to the reality that survivors often require years before they can identify, report, or litigate what happened.

The decision affirmed lower-court rulings and answered the federal certified question in favor of constitutionality. It returned the underlying survivor cases to litigation; it did not decide whether the defendants were liable on the facts.

Hansel’s work on the statute also included legislative testimony. Hansel testified in support of the Act and later participated in defending its constitutionality.

The Officer behind the Station Door

One current Child Victims Act case reaches abuse alleged to have occurred inside a Baltimore police station. Hansel represents a woman who says an officer raped her in 2006, when she was sixteen and in police custody. DNA evidence was recovered during the criminal investigation.

The officer entered an Alford plea to misconduct in office in 2008, received a suspended sentence, and resigned. The revived civil litigation examines the responsibility of individual officials and public entities for abuse committed through custodial power and what police records showed before and after the incident.

Hansel said, “Given that clear history, there is an obligation on the part of anyone with power to stop it.” That obligation belongs to both individual officers and the department. Custody, supervision, complaint history, discipline, and retention determine whether power is constrained before another person is placed behind the same door.

Civil-Rights Precedent in Maryland

Hansel founded Hansel Law after years of civil-rights, government-liability, class, employment, medical-malpractice, and appellate practice. His reported decisions exceed twenty, and his appellate work includes individual representation and pro bono amicus advocacy.

The underlying cases involved wrongful imprisonment, jail violence, sexual coercion in public housing, a prison-bus murder, repeated school assault, a police shooting of a dog, and survivors seeking access to court.

His appellate matters established Maryland pattern-or-practice liability in Longtin, limited public-official immunity after gross negligence in Cooper, preserved negligent-supervision claims in Gambrill, protected the jury’s role in Myers, and upheld revived Child Victims Act claims.

The published decisions now govern later Maryland claims involving pattern-or-practice liability, immunity, negligent supervision, qualified-immunity appeals, and revived abuse actions.