Maryland officials greenlit a $750,000 payment last week to settle a lawsuit filed by a transgender woman who was beaten by a correctional officer at Central Booking in Baltimore.

The settlement in favor of Amber Maree Canter, whose assault while incarcerated at Baltimore’s main pretrial detention center led to Correctional Officer Zanel Santana being fired and found guilty of misconduct and assault charges, was approved at an Oct. 30 Board of Public Works meeting.

The case stemmed from a June 2019 encounter at Central Booking where surveillance cameras captured Officer Santana yanking Canter up in an illegal chokehold until she was unconscious, proceeding to drop her to the concrete floor face-first. Santana is named as a defendant in the lawsuit, as well as two other correctional officers who “watched as Santana viciously brutalized Amber,” according to the complaint.

Canter suffered multiple injuries, including fractures to her left orbital bone, optic nerve canal and anterior skull base as well as multiple sinus fractures, severe bruising and internal bleeding.

Canter’s attorney, Malcolm Ruff, said that the case highlighted a “culture of inhumanity in corrections” and discrimination faced by transgender people behind bars.

“Jail is already bad enough as it is,” Ruff, who is also a Democratic state delegate representing District 41, said on Monday. He said his client was an “advocate and leader” in defending transgender rights and a “poster child for what’s wrong” in Maryland’s correctional system.

“Behind those walls, there is a whole other world, right under our noses,” Ruff said.

The state’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services did not immediately return a request for comment.

Canter had previously won a $92,000 settlement with the department. That lawsuit alleged the state’s prison system didn’t allow Canter to continue with her hormone therapy regimen, leading to multiple self-injury attempts by Canter and medical issues stemming from estrogen withdrawal.

The settlement approved last week alleged that the state had failed to protect Canter from Santana, leading to the June 2019 beating. Canter had been in a dispute with jail officials over recreational time when she sat on the floor “in protest,” before Santana arrived and escalated the matter into a physical altercation, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit also partially hinged on a new legal theory under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in 2022 incorporated protections for people with gender dysphoria. Canter had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria before being incarcerated, and jail officials knew it, but discriminated against her over time, the lawsuit says.

The settlement was one of a handful of resolutions to public safety and corrections lawsuits being handled at the Board of Public Works’ meeting last week. Comptroller Brooke Lierman questioned the amount of settlements coming from the state’s corrections department, estimating around $10.5 million had been paid out to settle the department’s lawsuits this year.

“These are all settlements that have taken a few years to get to us,” she said, noting she wanted to make sure the board wasn’t approving a similar amount of settlements in two years.

DPSCS Deputy Secretary of Administration Joseph Sedtal noted that the state was undergoing a “comprehensive” review of departmental policies, including rules for document retention that become critical in litigation. Lierman said drafting new policies is a “really important” step, adding that “if it’s not actually happening on the ground, then it doesn’t really matter.”

The settlement resolves the case for all of the defendants involved except for Santana, who did not reply to the complaint. Litigation will continue against the former correctional officer, Ruff said.