Professional Liability Insurance Coverage - Nursing Homes, Assisted Living Facilities, Nurse Midwives, and Licensed Certified Midwives - Disclosure (Nyeli Rose Lewis Act of 2026)
HB0442 expands Maryland’s child-hearsay evidentiary rule to allow an out-of-court statement made by a child victim or witness to be admitted when the statement was made to a qualified forensic interviewer. The bill defines “forensic interviewer” as a trained professional who is not a law enforcement officer and who works for or under contract with a child advocacy center or comparable entity. It also updates the statute’s definitions and keeps the existing safeguards that the child must generally be under 13, the statement must concern specified abuse, neglect, or violent-crime cases, and the statement must meet trustworthiness and notice requirements.
The bill preserves the core structure of current law: the statement must be offered in a juvenile or criminal proceeding, the court must find particularized guarantees of trustworthiness, and the opposing party must receive advance notice and an opportunity to depose the witness. In child in need of assistance proceedings, the statement may still be admitted even if the child does not testify, subject to corroboration requirements. The act takes effect October 1, 2025, and amends Criminal Procedure Article § 11-304.
HB0442 amends Maryland Criminal Procedure § 11-304 by adding forensic interviewers to the list of professionals to whom a child’s out-of-court statement may be made for hearsay-admissibility purposes. This change broadens the range of child advocacy and forensic interview settings whose recorded or reported statements can be used in court, while leaving intact the statute’s age limits, case-type limits, notice provisions, deposition rights, and judicial trustworthiness review. The practical effect is to make child forensic interviews more usable as evidence in abuse, neglect, sexual offense, and other violent-crime cases involving young children.
The bill appears generally supportive of child-protection and prosecution efforts, reflecting a policy choice to make reliable forensic interviews more available in court. Because no committee transcripts or recorded votes were provided, there is no documented opposition or floor debate in the supplied materials. Based on the text alone, the measure is framed as a targeted evidentiary update rather than a broad expansion of criminal procedure.
The main potential point of contention is the balance between improving child-witness evidence and protecting defendants’ confrontation and due-process interests. Supporters would likely emphasize that forensic interviewers are specially trained to conduct neutral, nonleading interviews and that the bill preserves trustworthiness findings, notice, and deposition rights. Any concern would likely focus on whether statements made outside the courtroom to a non-law-enforcement interviewer should be treated as sufficiently reliable, especially in serious criminal cases.