NJ Settles Turnpike Shooting Suit

February 3, 2001

New Jersey Agrees to Settle Suit From Turnpike Shooting

By IVER PETERSON and DAVID M. HALBFINGER
Ruth Fremson/ The New York Times

TRENTON, Feb. 2 - New Jersey's attorney general agreed today to pay nearly
$13 million to settle a lawsuit arising from the state's most explosive
racial profiling incident, in which several young minority men were shot and
wounded by state troopers in a 1998 traffic stop.

In an effort to quell the aftershocks of the case, the attorney general,
John J. Farmer Jr., also threw out criminal charges against 128 other
defendants who claimed their arrests were racially tainted.

The settlement ends the civil rights suit brought by four black and Hispanic
men whose van was stopped in April 1998 on the New Jersey Turnpike. Three of
the men were shot and wounded when the van began to back up toward a
trooper, accidentally, according to the driver.

The case turned the state police's practice of singling out minorities for
traffic stops and searches into perhaps the nation's premier civil rights
issue. The fallout from the case also for the first time revealed how
pervasive the practice was, not just in New Jersey, but nationwide. The
young victims of the turnpike shooting were quick to place their experience
in the context of civil rights issues from the past.

"It seems like we're still in the struggle, you know?" Jarmaine Grant, one
of the three men injured in the shooting, said at a news conference today
announcing the settlement. "Like Dr. King, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, they took
the back door so we could take the front door. But it seems to me now like
we're still taking the back door."

The settlement stipulates that the state does not admit any guilt in the
shooting of the three men - Mr. Grant, Rayshawn Brown and Danny Reyes.
Keshon L. Moore, the driver of the van, was the only one of the four who was
not injured.

But Peter Neufeld, one of the men's lawyers, said that the settlement spoke
for itself.

"In the agreement there is no statement admitting liability or denying
liability," he said. "However, they just agreed to pay $12.95 million, and
we think that that number speaks volumes about what happened that night." In
January, a New Jersey appeals court reinstated criminal charges against the
two troopers, John Hogan and James Kenna, overruling a lower-court judge who
had dismissed the charges. Mr. Kenna is now charged with attempted murder
and aggravated assault and Mr. Hogan with aggravated assault.

While the settlement had been expected, what occurred here in Trenton, even
as lawyers were announcing the settlement in Lower Manhattan, was a
surprise. The attorney general said he would move to dismiss criminal
charges against dozens of people accused of illegally transporting weapons
or drugs.

In all, Mr. Farmer said, he would seek to drop charges in 77 of 94 cases in
which defendants claimed they were stopped only because of their race or
ethnicity, and were therefore seeking to suppress as evidence the weapons or
drugs that troopers seized.

Mr. Farmer, who took over as attorney general in June 1999 at the height of
the uproar over racial profiling, has been besieged ever since by the
contending forces at work. There are the lawyers for a host of criminal
defendants claiming to be victims of profiling, who continue to accuse the
state of a cover-up. There is the legal team for the 1998 shooting victims,
now headed by the celebrity lawyer Johnnie L. Cochran Jr., whose lawsuit
against the two troopers is still pending. And there are the state
legislators, caught between an instinctive loyalty to the state police and a
fear that the charge of racism will haunt them, who are to hold hearings
within weeks on 90,000 pages of documents, released by the state last fall,
that attest to the long- denied fact that profiling was common on New
Jersey's highways.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Farmer called today's decision to dismiss the cases a
difficult one, and he seemed to swing between a resigned acknowledgment that
the accused drivers might have prevailed in having their cases thrown out,
and a tough insistence that the evidence against them was sound, even if the
way it was obtained might not have been.
 
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