Justly Prudent files federal civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Black police corporal targeted for supporting colleagues' discrimination claims

On May 8, 2026, Justly Prudent filed a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of Corporal James E. Carpenter, a 19-year veteran of the Prince George's County Police Department, against Prince George's County, Maryland and two of his former supervisors. The complaint, filed in the Circuit Court of Maryland for Prince George's County, accuses the County and the two supervisors of waging a sustained, three-year campaign of retaliation after Carpenter spoke up for two of his colleagues—one Black, one white—who had filed race discrimination charges against the very same supervisors.

Carpenter, who is African American, joined the Department in January 2007 and has served continuously in its specialized auto-theft investigations unit since 2017. Through the rating period that ended in January 2022, his annual performance appraisals consistently rated him at the "Outstanding" or "Exceeds Satisfactory" level, and his most recent appraisal before the events at issue carried a numerical score of 3.85, at the high end of the "Outstanding" band. Carpenter has no sustained disciplinary actions, no use-of-force violations, and no findings of professional misconduct anywhere in his nearly two decades of service.

That record, according to the complaint, became inconvenient the moment Carpenter began telling the truth about how his supervisors were treating Black officers under their command.

In November 2022, Carpenter raised concerns in a routine squad meeting about the quality of supervision the unit was receiving from his immediate and second-line supervisors, including their differential treatment of Black officers. Within months, the complaint alleges, the retaliation began. In March 2023, Carpenter's first-line supervisor delivered a performance appraisal that dropped Carpenter's overall numerical rating from 3.85 to 2.80 and assigned him a "Needs Improvement" score in Investigations—the lowest possible rating short of "Unsatisfactory." That single rating cost Carpenter the merit increase associated with the rating period, with compounding consequences for the rest of his career.

When Carpenter submitted a four-page rebuttal supported by roughly 35 pages of documentary evidence—including an FBI Washington Field Office email reflecting the value of his federal task-force work and an internal email that contradicted the appraisal's narrative—the supervisor retaliated again. Five days later, the complaint alleges, the supervisor quietly inserted a five-page negative supervisor rebuttal into Carpenter's personnel file, removed Carpenter's supporting evidence from the rebuttal package, and gave Carpenter no notice that any of it had happened. Carpenter would not learn of the secret rebuttal for 17 months, long after the contractual deadline to challenge it had expired.

The lawsuit alleges that Carpenter's protected activity continued, and the retaliation escalated alongside it. In November 2023, an African-American colleague in the unit filed an EEOC charge against the same two supervisors. In July 2024, a Caucasian colleague filed his own discrimination charge identifying Carpenter and two other African-American officers as the targets of the supervisors' conduct. Both colleagues were transferred out of the unit. Another African-American sergeant in the chain of command was suspended for 17 months on a 20-count internal affairs investigation that exonerated him on every charge—and was then transferred out of the unit anyway.

According to the complaint, Carpenter served as a participating witness in both of those discrimination charges. After his first-line supervisor learned of that participation in August 2024, the retaliation widened: denial of overtime, denial of training that cost Carpenter his elected seat on the Board of Directors of the Southeast Chapter of the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators, the lapse of his federal deputization with the FBI Washington Field Office Safe Streets Task Force, the redirection of straightforward case closures to other officers in a manner that artificially depressed his apparent productivity, and—most alarming—the repeated withholding of backup support during high-risk operations involving armed-vehicle takedowns and arrests. The complaint alleges that the absence of backup forced Carpenter to seek out-of-jurisdiction assistance from a Howard County detective who traveled into Prince George's County to provide the operational support Carpenter's own squad declined to give.

The retaliation reached what the complaint describes as its most serious form on December 30, 2024, when the County's Office of Law submitted to the EEOC a position statement responding to Carpenter's October 2024 retaliation charge. Attached to that submission, as Exhibit A, was a copy of Carpenter's 2023–2024 performance appraisal, but the document had been altered. According to the complaint, the version submitted to the federal civil rights agency contained a check mark in a box stating that Carpenter had reviewed and agreed his position description was accurate and current. Carpenter had expressly declined to mark that box on February 12, 2024, and his retained original copy of the appraisal contains no such mark. After Carpenter submitted a reply to the EEOC that included side-by-side copies of the original and altered documents, the County never responded, never retracted the submission, and never investigated how an altered document came to be filed with a federal agency.

In a striking detail, the complaint notes that on the very same day in January 2024 that Carpenter's first-line supervisor was preparing the appraisal that included the "Needs Improvement" rating, that same supervisor also signed two separate award nomination forms recommending Carpenter for an Exemplary Performance Award and a Special Achievement Award—each one certifying, by the supervisor's own signature, that Carpenter had received "Outstanding" overall ratings on his recent appraisals and had "met ALL criteria required" for the awards. The two documents covered the same rating period.

In August 2025, after Carpenter filed a formal grievance, the Prince George's County Office of the Chief sustained his complaint and ordered the altered 2022–2023 and 2023–2024 appraisals permanently removed from his personnel file, replacing them with revised appraisals reflecting overall "Outstanding" ratings of 3.85. The County, however, imposed no discipline on the two supervisors. Carpenter then filed an Internal Affairs complaint in September 2025, but according to the complaint, his first-line supervisor had been transferred in October 2024 into the very Internal Affairs Division now responsible for investigating him. The County conducted a single recorded interview of Carpenter on October 22, 2025, refused his request for a copy of the recording, and according to the complaint has not communicated with him about the matter since.

The complaint also places the conduct in a broader institutional context. In 2021, Prince George's County paid roughly $25 million to settle race discrimination and retaliation claims brought by the Hispanic National Law Enforcement Association and several former PGCPD employees—a settlement, the complaint alleges, that put the County on notice of patterns of disparate treatment in performance appraisals, training, overtime, and discipline of officers of color. The conduct alleged against Carpenter and his colleagues, the complaint argues, is exactly the pattern the 2021 settlement was supposed to end.

"James Carpenter spent 19 years building a record that any officer in this country would be proud of, and he risked all of it to do the right thing for his colleagues," said Jordan D. Howlette, Managing Attorney at Justly Prudent and counsel for Carpenter. "What happened to him in return—the falsified records, the hidden rebuttal, the altered document submitted to a federal agency—is not just retaliation. It is a deliberate attempt to use the machinery of a police department to punish an officer for refusing to look the other way. This lawsuit is about restoring his record, holding those responsible accountable, and making sure the next officer who speaks up is not made to pay the same price."

The lawsuit brings claims under Section 1 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (42 U.S.C. § 1981), Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Maryland Fair Employment Practices Act, and the Prince George's County Code. It seeks, among other things, the expungement of the altered records and the formal retraction of the altered document submitted to the EEOC, the restoration of Carpenter's federal deputization, and the referral of his Internal Affairs complaint to an unconflicted external investigative authority.

The case is James E. Carpenter v. Prince George's County, Maryland, et al. (C-16-CV-26-002878), filed in the Circuit Court of Maryland for Prince George's County.