Background
The dispute arose from a Baltimore City development project known as the Clipper Mill Planned Unit Development. When developer MCB Woodberry Developer, LLC sought approval to amend the PUD to add townhomes and convert a tractor building into a mixed-use project, two homeowners’ associations—the Millrace Council and the Clipper Mill Homeowners’ Association—opposed the efforts through letters, testimony, and presentations before the Baltimore City Planning Commission, and ultimately filed a petition for administrative mandamus in circuit court challenging the Commission’s approval of the Townhome Project.
Four days after the circuit court’s hearing on that petition, Woodberry filed a separate lawsuit against the HOAs alleging breach of contract, tortious interference, and civil conspiracy, and seeking $25 million in punitive damages. The HOAs moved to dismiss it as a strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP) under Md. Code Ann., Cts. & Jud. Proc. § 5-807. The circuit court granted the motion within five months, and the Appellate Court of Maryland affirmed, finding the suit’s timing, outsized damages demand, overbroad discovery requests, and conclusory allegations demonstrated it was vexatious litigation aimed at silencing the HOAs. Woodberry then voluntarily paid the HOAs’ attorney’s fees and expenses.
Approximately two years later, the HOAs filed a class action for malicious use of process against Woodberry, its parent company, and the law firm and attorney who drafted the SLAPP complaint. They alleged special injuries including chilling of First Amendment rights, property value diminution due to the threatened liability, and what they characterized as a seizure of personal property through Woodberry’s broad discovery demands. The circuit court dismissed the complaint for failure to plead special injury, and the Appellate Court affirmed. The Supreme Court of Maryland then granted certiorari.
The Court’s Holding
The Supreme Court of Maryland unanimously affirmed the dismissal, holding that the HOAs failed to plead the “special injury” element required to state a claim for malicious use of process. Writing for the Court, Justice Eaves traced the tort’s origins to the Statute of Marlborough (1267), which superseded the earlier common-law follow-on action for malicious civil prosecution except in cases involving wrongful arrest, seizure of property, or a comparable harm not ordinarily attendant to any lawsuit. Maryland adopted this “English rule” in 1878 and has adhered to it ever since. The Court emphasized that prior precedents finding special injury—wage garnishment, a malicious injunction barring use of business property, and a wrongful judgment lien precipitating mortgage foreclosure—all involved actual or functional dispossession of property, not merely the ordinary costs and stresses of defending litigation.
Applying that framework, the Court held that the HOAs’ alleged harms—litigation expenses, temporary diminution in property values, anxiety, emotional distress, and the claimed chilling of constitutional rights—do not differ in kind from the burdens that attend defense of any civil action. The underlying SLAPP produced no arrests, no garnishments, no liens, no injunctions against use of the HOAs’ property, and no foreclosures; discovery was stayed by agreement and the case was dismissed within five months. Those ordinary litigation burdens, however real and substantial, do not satisfy the special-injury requirement.
The Court also declined the HOAs’ invitation to adopt a per se rule that SLAPP victims automatically satisfy the special-injury element. Maryland’s anti-SLAPP statute, CJP § 5-807, is a procedural mechanism that confers a right to move for early dismissal; by its plain terms it neither provides a right to damages nor alters the elements of the common law tort. The Court noted that the General Assembly considered and rejected language awarding attorney’s fees and costs when it revised the statute in 2010, and has declined in every subsequent session—including the most recent one—to expand available remedies or adopt the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act. Any such expansion, the Court held, is a matter for the legislature, not the judiciary.
Key Takeaways
- To state a claim for malicious use of process in Maryland, a plaintiff must plead a “special injury”—something akin to arrest of the person, seizure of property, garnishment, or a malicious injunction barring use of property—not merely the expense, delay, emotional distress, or reputational harm that attend any civil lawsuit.
- Successfully obtaining dismissal of a SLAPP under CJP § 5-807 does not, by itself, satisfy the special-injury element; the anti-SLAPP statute adds a dismissal mechanism but does not alter common-law tort elements or create a new damages remedy.
- Maryland’s legislature has repeatedly and deliberately declined to enact fee-shifting or enhanced damages for SLAPP defendants; courts may not judicially supply those remedies through tort doctrine.
- Broad discovery demands, even if characterized as a “seizure” of property, do not constitute a special injury where the parties agreed to stay discovery and no process actually issued to compel production.
Why It Matters
The decision clarifies a significant gap in Maryland’s anti-SLAPP protection: defendants who successfully defeat a SLAPP under § 5-807 cannot automatically convert that victory into a damages action for malicious use of process. Unless the SLAPP included some coercive process that dispossessed them of property—a lien, a garnishment, an injunction—they are left without a damages remedy no matter how clearly retaliatory the original suit was. For practitioners, this means that recovering monetary damages for being SLAPPed in Maryland depends almost entirely on voluntary fee payment by the opposing party, contractual fee-shifting provisions, or Maryland Rule 1-341 (bad-faith litigation sanctions).
The opinion also signals that any meaningful expansion of SLAPP remedies in Maryland must come from the General Assembly. The Court took pains to catalog the legislature’s decade-long pattern of rejecting bills that would add fee-shifting, mandatory dismissal with prejudice, or adoption of the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act—framing those repeated rejections as deliberate policy choices that courts should respect. Advocacy groups and attorneys representing clients in public-participation disputes will likely renew pressure on the legislature in response.