Four cases decided in the same ten-week stretch show a state that acts with urgency when it removes a child from a parent — and with caution, delay, or outright immunity when something goes wrong afterward.
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Maryland can remove a child from a parent in hours. Holding itself accountable can take months—or never happen at all.
Francesca Trull has one question Maryland still hasn’t answered: why was the pool at her son’s foster home uncovered, with the ladder still attached, when the state decided that home was safer for two-year-old Le’Zus than she was.
Le’Zus drowned in a backyard pool at a foster home in Brooklyn Park on June 27, 2026, roughly three weeks after this piece went to research. He’d been placed there by the Baltimore City Department of Social Services. Anne Arundel County Police are investigating, but the department directed reporters to file a Maryland Public Information Act request for the police report — the ordinary channel, moving at the ordinary pace, for a child who died in the state’s custody. The Department of Human Services says it’s reviewing the incident and that “the safety and well-being of Maryland’s children are our highest priorities.” It has not said whether the home was ever inspected for pool compliance, or how often homes with pools get checked at all.
How fast does Maryland move to take a child from a parent, compared to how fast it moves to verify the child is safe once it has?
Trull’s question — a version of “you took him to protect him” — is really a question about tempo. How fast does Maryland move to take a child from a parent, compared to how fast it moves to verify the child is safe once it has? Three appellate rulings handed down within the same ten weeks as Le’Zus’s death answer that question with more precision than any single tragedy can.
Case One · In re: K.B.
Reunification by Default Is Not the Same as a Hearing
K.B. was ten months old when a Baltimore County magistrate changed her permanency plan — the state’s official answer to “what happens to this child long-term” — from reunification with her mother to a concurrent plan of reunification and adoption. The hearing where that happened was not supposed to determine a permanency plan at all. It was an initial review hearing, six months ahead of the permanency hearing already on the calendar.
The mother’s history was serious: five prior children removed by Massachusetts authorities, parental rights terminated as to four of them, a guilty plea to child pornography offenses involving one child, and a stack of psychological evaluations diagnosing bipolar disorder with psychosis, PTSD, and — in one clinician’s words — “extremely low parent awareness skills.” A sexual-risk evaluation recommended no unsupervised contact with children at all.
A real permanency plan requires a hearing where the court actually weighs six specific statutory factors.
None of that is in dispute. What the Maryland Supreme Court held, on June 22, 2026, is that none of it excused skipping the process. A presumptive plan of reunification that attaches automatically when a child is removed is not a legal “permanency plan” under Maryland law — a real permanency plan requires a hearing where the court actually weighs six specific statutory factors: the child’s safety in the parent’s home, her emotional ties to her parents and siblings, her attachment to her current caregiver, how long she’s lived there, and the potential harm of moving her versus the potential harm of leaving her in state custody indefinitely.
The juvenile court had done none of that. It had, in its own words on the record, relied on a different and easier statute — the general six-month review provision — and concluded that boilerplate notice buried in the disposition order (“the plan of reunification may be changed”) satisfied due process. The Supreme Court disagreed on both counts: the review statute cannot substitute for a permanency hearing, and generic future-tense notice is not notice of an actual hearing’s date, time, and purpose.
The department that skipped the state’s own required safeguards was pursuing an outcome — adoption — that may well have been correct on the merits. The Court didn’t say the outcome was wrong. It said the shortcut was.
Tellingly, Baltimore County never invoked the waiver available for cases exactly like this one — chronic abuse, prior terminations — that would have let it skip the reunification-effort requirement entirely and move straight to a faster track. It had the tool. It didn’t use it. It tried to get to the same place informally instead, and the Supreme Court sent the case back for a hearing that should have happened five months earlier, the right way.
It had the tool. It didn’t use it.
Case Two · Augustin v. Duncan
An Aunt Learns of an Emergency Custody Order After It’s Already Signed
Both of a young child’s parents were killed. In an emergency order, entered ex parte — meaning without notice to anyone who might object — a circuit court gave temporary custody of the child and his half-siblings to the Duncans, the parents of a friend of the deceased mother. The children’s paternal aunt, Cherlie Augustin, found out only after the order was signed. She intervened, asked for visitation and then custody, and the circuit court dismissed her case entirely. It also ordered her to help cover the fees of the attorney appointed to represent the children.
The Appellate Court of Maryland reversed on May 5, 2026 — though not, technically, on the notice question itself. By the time the case reached the appellate court, a February 2026 final judgment had already superseded the original ex parte order, making Augustin’s direct challenge to that order moot. What the court did reverse was the circuit court’s dismissal of her case, and the reasoning turns on a distinction that matters more than it sounds: the constitutional presumption favoring a parent’s custody decisions — the doctrine that normally makes it hard for a relative to challenge a fit parent, requiring proof of unfitness or “exceptional circumstances” — simply doesn’t apply here, because there is no parent left to defer to. Both parties, aunt and family friends alike, stood on equal footing as non-parents. The circuit court had dismissed Augustin’s case by holding her to a legal bar built for a different kind of dispute. On remand, the case reverts to an ordinary best-interests analysis, like any other custody matter between two non-parents.
The constitutional presumption favoring a parent’s custody decisions simply doesn’t apply here, because there is no parent left to defer to.
The emergency order that started all this was entered without her knowledge, in a proceeding she had every legal right to be part of, deciding where a member of her own family would live. The correction came a year later, after months of litigation and an interlocutory appeal that the other side tried to have dismissed as moot.
Case Three · Bd. of Education v. Sturm
When the State Decides It Can’t Afford to Answer
Rhonda Sturm says a teacher sexually abused her at a Wicomico County elementary school between 1967 and 1971. She waited more than five decades to sue, which is precisely the harm the 2023 Child Victims Act was written to address — it eliminated the statute of limitations for childhood sexual abuse claims against institutions, public and private alike.
The Wicomico County Board of Education didn’t dispute what happened. It argued sovereign immunity: the General Assembly didn’t authorize school boards to carry liability insurance covering claims like this until July 1, 1971 — after the abuse Sturm alleges had already ended. No insurance mandate, the Board argued, means no mechanism to pay a judgment, which means immunity survives no matter what the 2023 law intended.
The legislature meant to open the courthouse door… meaning to do so and providing the money to make it real are two different acts.
On June 23, 2026, the Maryland Supreme Court agreed, unanimously. Chief Justice Fader’s opinion doesn’t dispute that the legislature meant to open the courthouse door for survivors like Sturm — it holds that meaning to do so and providing the money to make it real are two different acts, and only the legislature can do the second one. The case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning Sturm can refile if lawmakers ever create a funding mechanism. The Court, in effect, wrote Annapolis a to-do list and put the ruling in the mail.
The Court, in effect, wrote Annapolis a to-do list and put the ruling in the mail.
The stakes are not small. More than 12,000 people have filed claims under the Child Victims Act, mostly involving state juvenile detention facilities, and the state’s own filings put potential liability from pre-1982 claims alone above $1 billion — estimates for the full exposure across foster care, schools, and other institutions run far higher. Maryland has already moved to dismiss more than 200 of those claims on sovereign-immunity grounds. Sturm is the one where the Supreme Court said, on the facts closest to the line, that immunity wins.
What the Pattern Actually Shows
Would the conduct survive if the jerseys were swapped?
Father & Co. applies a simple test to institutions on both sides of a custody dispute: would the conduct survive if the jerseys were swapped — if the parent had done to the state what the state did to the parent? Run these four cases through it.
A parent who moved a child to a new home without telling the other parent, and without a court order, would be found in contempt within days. A department of social services did roughly that to K.B. — changed her long-term placement trajectory at a hearing that wasn’t supposed to decide it, without applying the factors the law requires — and the remedy took five months and a Supreme Court opinion to arrive.
A parent who left a family member out of a decision about where a child would live, entirely, until it was already done, would be accused of alienation. A circuit court did exactly that to Cherlie Augustin, and it took a year and an appellate reversal to restore her standing to even be heard.
Sovereign immunity is a real legal doctrine with a real purpose. It is also, functionally, the state extending itself a grace period no parent litigant is ever offered.
And an institution that tells a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, decades later, that it takes her allegations seriously but genuinely cannot pay for what happened because of a paperwork gap in 1971 — that is a sentence no parent could say in family court and expect a judge to accept. Sovereign immunity is a real legal doctrine with a real purpose. It is also, functionally, the state extending itself a grace period that no parent litigant is ever offered.
The question these four cases raise isn’t whether Maryland’s child welfare system makes correct decisions about who should have custody. It’s whether the system holds itself to the same procedural and factual rigor — the same speed of accountability — that it demands of the parents on the other side of the docket.
None of this requires believing any of the underlying removals or placements were wrong on the merits. K.B.’s mother’s history was extensive and documented. Le’Zus was removed from Trull’s home for reasons DHS has not disputed. The question these four cases raise isn’t whether Maryland’s child welfare system makes correct decisions about who should have custody. It’s whether the system holds itself to the same procedural and factual rigor — the same speed of accountability — that it demands of the parents on the other side of the docket. Three appellate courts, in the same season, answered no.
Three appellate courts, in the same season, answered no.
Le’Zus’s public records request is still open. Maryland’s legislature has not yet acted on the funding gap the Supreme Court identified in Sturm. Both are the kind of unfinished business a state can leave sitting for as long as no one keeps asking.
Both are the kind of unfinished business a state can leave sitting for as long as no one keeps asking.
Sources: This report draws on the full text of three appellate opinions: In re: K.B., No. 52, Sept. Term 2025 (Md., filed June 22, 2026); Cherlie Augustin v. David Duncan, et al., Nos. 1566 (Sept. Term 2025) & 22 (Sept. Term 2026) (Md. App. Ct., filed May 5, 2026); and Bd. of Education for Wicomico County v. Sturm, No. 54, Sept. Term 2025 (Md., filed June 23, 2026), all published by the Maryland Judiciary. Case-history reporting on the Sturm ruling and the Child Victims Act’s broader liability exposure drew on coverage by The Daily Record and The Baltimore Banner. Details on Le’Zus’s death and the ongoing Maryland Public Information Act request were drawn from Department of Human Services public statements and Anne Arundel County Police Department correspondence with reporters; no police report had been released as of publication.
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