When she was a student at Prince George’s Community College in the late 2000s and early 2010s, Tiana M. Boardman earned money for books and tuition by working as a server at the Hooters in Laurel. Some 13 years later, in 2023, Boardman, a lawyer by then, won a $4 million civil verdict from a jury in her first trial, in which she represented a Maryland state prisoner who had suffered abuse by other inmates because of negligence by correctional officers.
