DEFENDANTS MAY APPEAL CONVICTIONS BASED ON NEW PROFILING DATA

TRENTON, Dec. 6 A New Jersey appeals court ruled today that four defendants
convicted of drug offenses after traffic stops by state troopers could file
new appeals or reopen their cases based on information about racial
profiling that surfaced after their trials or guilty pleas.

Also today, the lawyer for a man who says he was forced to spend 18 days in
jail after being stopped because of his race moved to force Justice Peter G.
Verniero of the State Supreme Court - who as attorney general in April 1999
was the first New Jersey official to acknowledge that racial profiling
existed - to answer questions under oath in the man's federal civil rights
lawsuit.

In June, an appellate panel ruled that criminal defendants in pending cases
could introduce evidence of racial profiling to seek dismissals. But the
decisions today by three judges of the Appellate Division of State Superior
Court in Hackensack were believed to be the first in which people already
convicted of crimes had sought to reopen their cases.

Judge Edwin H. Stern, on behalf of a unanimous panel, ruled in one case that
defendants could raise profiling issues for the first time on direct appeal
if they were convicted or pleaded guilty before Mr. Verniero's 1999 report
on profiling.

That case involved two co-defendants who had pleaded guilty, and state
lawyers argued that in doing so they had waived their rights to appeal. But
Judge Stern wrote that "a guilty plea does not constitute a waiver of a
`profiling' claim" if the issue of profiling had already been raised by the
defense, or at least alluded to, before trial as part of an effort to
suppress evidence obtained at a traffic stop.

"They're opening up the door here to people who have been convicted, at
least before the report was published in 1999," said Carl H. Hadigian, the
lawyer for Alexander B. Chapman, who along with Ruben Velez pleaded guilty
to marijuana possession with intent to distribute and was sentenced in 1998.

The two other cases involved men who were convicted of drug offenses after
jury trials.

Today's rulings do not apply to convicts who have already exhausted their
appeals. But a lawyer who has been involved in many racial profiling cases,
William H. Buckman, said he was already representing one prisoner whose
direct appeals had been unsuccessful but who was seeking what is known as
post-conviction relief.

Mr. Buckman said he would argue in court that documents about racial
profiling that the state has only recently released constitute newly
discovered evidence - one of the few grounds for such relief.

In a separate federal civil rights case, Mr. Buckman is also representing
Jose Baez, a taxi driver who was arrested after a traffic stop and jailed
for 18 days in Burlington County in February 1998. Mr. Baez has sued the
troopers who arrested him, along with high-ranking law enforcement
officials, and has sought to take depositions from Mr. Verniero and Paul H.
Zoubek, director of the Division of Criminal Justice.

In a motion to quash a subpoena filed Nov. 16, Mr. Verniero's lawyers argued
that civil litigants were "not generally entitled to depose high-ranking
government officials - such as Justice Verniero and First Assistant Attorney
General Zoubek - concerning their reasons for taking official actions,"
especially when information could be obtained from other sources.

In a response filed today, Mr. Buckman said that only Mr. Verniero and Mr.
Zoubek could say whether they had "explicit knowledge" of racial profiling
at the time of Mr. Baez's arrest.

"Plaintiffs are entitled to explore when these potential deponents knew of
these conditions, what they did in response thereto, and how far the State
of New Jersey is implicated, not only in the knowledge and nurture of
profiling, but in its cover-up," Mr. Buckman wrote.

In a two-page statement issued on Friday, Mr. Verniero defended himself
against accusations that he had misled lawmakers last year about the extent
of his knowledge of racial profiling by the state police when he was
attorney general. But Mr. Buckman argued in his papers today that that
statement only bolstered his contention that Mr. Verniero should have to
answer questions.

Mr. Verniero's statement came five days after the state released nearly
100,000 pages of documents detailing its history of profiling.

In another development today, an organization of about 600 black lawyers
denounced profiling and called on the State Legislature to investigate the
state police and the attorney general's office.

Ronald Thompson, president of the group, the Garden State Bar Association,
said the reams of documents released on Nov. 27 confirmed that profiling had
been an "ingrained, established practice" of the state police for decades
and showed that high-ranking officials knew about it.