Mady Castigan and Tom Sayers
Apr 2, 2025
There's more to this article! Read the full MadyCast article here.
Gov. Moore's prisons defied a judge’s order to follow standards to keep a woman safe from rape, as AG Brown has mounted "vigorous" defense against her lawsuit and lawmakers sideline meaningful reform.
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND — One day after Trump’s inauguration, Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown (D) released a powerful statement in support of trans people following the President’s day-one executive orders targeting the community.
“This is a decision that ignores the humanity and reality of transgender Americans across our State and nation,” Brown wrote about the orders, which included a provision that targeted trans women in federal prisons.
“The president’s mandate…requires federal prisons and shelters to segregate incarcerated people…by their sex, not their gender identities,” said Brown.
“Make no mistake: this Executive Order threatens people’s lives. The Maryland Office of the Attorney General will protect all Marylanders—especially members of marginalized communities—and wants transgender residents of our State to know they belong, they matter, and our Office will fight for their rights and safety.”
But these words came off as insincere to criminal justice advocates in Maryland who have been battling AG Brown’s office in federal court for years over decrepit conditions in the state’s prison system, which operates under policies and conditions similar to those laid out by Trump’s executive orders or those in Florida prisons which we reported on earlier this year.
Four years on from the death of Kim Wirtz, a trans woman who was found dead in her jail cell, trans prisoners in Maryland face deteriorating conditions as attempts at legislative reform move at a snail's pace. The Democratic supermajority in the state legislature has declined to even vote on legislation to meaningfully combat an epidemic of rape and other human rights violations of trans women that plague their prisons.
According to a 2023 report by the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS), a state agency under the purview of Governor Wes Moore (D), “All transgender individuals are housed according to physical genitalia.” This policy has led to nearly all trans women in Maryland prisons to be housed with men, since only a small percentage of trans women have access to bottom surgery that would allow them to be housed with women under these policies.
The same 2023 report, commissioned by the Maryland legislature, revealed that trans prisoners filed 34 sexual abuse or harassment complaints over three years, despite the prison system only housing an average of 73 trans inmates over the same period of time—over eighteen times the number of complaints filed by cisgender prisoners per capita. And this number is certainly an undercount, considering that trans prisoners have been prevented from filing complaints on numerous occasions by prison staff, according to court filings and lawyers for one of the lawsuits against the prison system.
Despite repeated promises for reform, the report reveals that abuse complaints have not declined, and the number of trans people placed in “administrative segregation,” a form of solitary confinement, has skyrocketed.
AG Brown’s office has been defending DPSCS from several lawsuits filed by trans prisoners impacted by these policies, at great cost to Maryland taxpayers. According to a budget analysis reported by the Baltimore Banner, DPSCS paid out $835,000 in settlements to trans prisoners in 2024 alone—nearly 40% of the total settlements paid to all prisoners in the entire system. And that’s not including the legal fees of defending against litigation.
Most of this money went to Amber Canter, a trans woman who was paid out $750,000 by the state after accusing three male correctional officers of putting her in a chokehold while she was incarcerated in one notorious Maryland prison.
A similar lawsuit currently being fought out in federal court, originally filed as Chelsea Gilliam vs. DPSCS in 2023, alleges a pattern of sexual abuse and harassment, neglect, unfair punishment, retaliation, and even torture across Maryland prisons. During proceedings, the state was found by a judge to have failed to comply with parts of a temporary restraining order in the case, similar to the Trump administration’s non-compliance of some court orders this year.
The lawsuit has since expanded from its lead plaintiff, Chelsea Gilliam, to include two additional trans plaintiffs who have spent time in Maryland prisons, Chloe Grey and Kennedy Holland. Kennedy and Chelsea have been released from prison as their lawsuit against DPSCS continues to be litigated, but Chloe has remained incarcerated throughout the case in men’s maximum security facilities, due to her life sentence.
Two of the three plaintiffs are Black, highlighting the intersectional nature of this problem. Black and brown trans people face disproportionate violence from the criminal justice system, even in “liberal” states like Maryland, where Black people make up just 30% of the population of Maryland, but are 72% of the state’s prison population, according to analyses by Maryland Equitable Justice Collective and Maryland Matters.
In a December 2024 ruling by Judge Matthew J. Maddox, the lawsuit’s core constitutional and Americans with Disabilities Act claims survived Maryland’s motion for dismissal. Judge Maddox, a Biden appointee, dismissed some of the other claims without prejudice, but Eve Hill, a lawyer at Brown Goldstein Levy who is representing the plaintiffs, expressed confidence in the strength of the lawsuit.
“The reason [Judge Maddox] dismissed most things was because we couldn’t identify the people who took the action,” she says. “So when we get discovery, which should be able to start soon, we’ll be able to identify those people and [amend the lawsuit] to add them.”
Hill also condemned both AG Brown and Governor Moore for “failing to carry out the very principles they espouse. In short, the Department of Corrections, which they control, is blatantly carrying out the very discrimination and cruelty they claim to oppose, but they do nothing to stop it and, in fact, defend it vigorously.”
In response to an inquiry by MadyCast News, the Maryland Attorney General’s office declined to comment on pending litigation, and said the Attorney General is constitutionally mandated to defend the State and its agencies against litigation.
“The Attorney General also works for the people and is committed to upholding the rights and dignity of the LGBTQ+ community and all Marylanders.”
Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services did not respond to a request for a comment.