At approximately 1:17 a.m. on June 13, 1998, an unidentified intruder entered apartment A-2 of the Pelham Wood Apartments, a second floor two-bedroom unit, through a sliding glass door and upon encountering the tenant in the apartment master bedroom shot him in the abdomen. The tenant of the Baltimore County apartment complex died from the gunshot wounds later that morning at Shock Trauma.

In response to a lawsuit brought by the surviving spouse of that tenant, the Maryland Court of Appeals, in Suzette Hemmings v. Pelham Wood LLLP, expanded Maryland negligence law so that a landlord now has a duty to repair a known dangerous or defective condition under its control to prevent a foreseeable third party criminal attack upon a tenant within a leased apartment.

The court’s opinion rested upon purportedly inadequate lighting in the rear of the apartment building.

This decision eviscerated a long line of Maryland cases stating that there is no general duty to protect another person from crime.

To succeed on a negligence claim, a plaintiff must prove four well-established elements: (1) that the defendant was under a duty to protect the plaintiff from injury, (2) that the defendant breached that duty, (3) that the plaintiff suffered actual injury or loss, and (4) that the loss or injury proximately resulted from the defendant’s breach of the duty.

Dating back to Colonial times, in Maryland, when a landlord has turned over control of a leased premises to a tenant, it ordinarily has no obligation to maintain the leased premises for the safety of the tenant. Mere ownership of land or buildings does not render the owner liable for injuries sustained by tenants or guests.

Distinguished from an “apartment” where the landlord relinquishes control of the leased premises to a tenant, the “common areas” are those portions of a landlord’s property over which it retains control.

Since the 1960s, Maryland courts have held a landlord has a legal duty to take reasonable security measures within common areas when: (1) the landlord had knowledge or should have knowledge of criminal activity having taken place on the premises, and (2) a landlord of ordinary intelligence, based on the nature of the past criminal activity, should have foreseen the harm suffered.

While the landlord in Pelham Wood maintained no records of past criminal activity, there were police department reports of twenty nine burglaries and two armed robberies that had occurred at the Pelham Wood Apartments in the preceding two years. One of the armed robberies took place inside an apartment; the other involved an assailant who, bearing a submachine gun, approached the victim from the woods to the rear of the apartment building.

In an attempt to deter criminal activity, in addition to regular door locks, each apartment had a dead bolt lock on the front door and a Charlie Bar securing the sliding glass door. Exterior lighting was provided around the property and in the (common area) hallways. The rear of the apartment building, however, was “pitch dark.”

In order to justify the court’s opinion, this case rested upon inadequate lighting in the rear of the apartment building. The court made a leap in logic, and found for the first time in Maryland, that because the landlord provided exterior lighting within the common areas as a security measure intended to deter criminal activity, that landlord was then responsible for violent criminal activity that occurred within an apartment (not within the common area).

The June 2003 case is a major expansion of Maryland law bringing together the line of cases imposing a duty for liability for physical harm which occurred in the common areas with the line of cases finding liability for demised premise damage resulting from a cause originating in the common area.

As a dissenting opinion in this case notes, this change in law “now makes a landlord an insurer against crime.”

Residential and commercial landlords should consider the adequacy of security measures and review leases for purposes of apportioning liability for negligence.