Hearing held on allowing hearsay exception for vulnerable adults' prior statements

Senate Bill 298 would extend Maryland’s existing tender-years hearsay procedure to defined “vulnerable adults,” allowing prior statements made to trusted individuals to be admissible in criminal cases when reliability and trustworthiness can be established in a pretrial hearing. The bill mirrors the child-victim exception’s procedural safeguards while expanding applicability to adults who are elderly or have cognitive disabilities.

Zac Shirley of the Attorney General’s Medicaid Fraud and Vulnerable Victims Unit told the committee the change would empower victims who suffer dementia, memory decline, or other conditions that impede testimony by the time cases reach trial. He gave a concrete example of an 84-year-old resident whose bodycam statement could not be used because the declarant died before trial.

Supporters including Baltimore City prosecutors said the bill balances defendants’ confrontation rights with victims’ access to justice and laid out the statutory factors a court must consider to admit a prior statement. Opponents (Public Defender and ACLU filings) said the bill risked due-process problems, raised concern about overbroad definitions (age-based categories and disability), and warned the bill could create one-way evidentiary advantages without adequate procedures to vet the statements.

Committee members asked about whether the required pretrial hearing should be mandatory; the sponsor said he was open to discussing procedural language after the judiciary’s feedback. No committee vote was recorded at the hearing.