PROFILING MAY MEAN DISMISSALS

TRENTON, Nov. 28 -- The disclosure Monday that New Jersey's top law
enforcement officials have known for years of widespread racial profiling
could lead to the dismissal of dozens of pending criminal cases, increased
scrutiny of Justice Peter G. Verniero of the State Supreme Court and a
ratcheting up of investigations of the state's record in singling out
minorities as drug and crime suspects, state officials said today.

A spokesman for Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. said today that Mr.
Farmer would soon begin to review 105 pending criminal cases arising from
traffic stops by the state police, who were shown in documents released by
Mr. Farmer Monday to have engaged in widespread singling out of minorities
for traffic stops.

Most of the subsequent arrests were for drug or weapons possession, and the
defendants all say that the evidence was tainted by the racial nature of
the traffic stop. It is not clear how many criminals might try to overturn
existing convictions, alleging they resulted from illegal racial profiling.

Meanwhile, at the State House, politicians were gearing up for a Senate
Judiciary Committee hearing into the state's history of racial profiling,
and in particular into the role of Mr. Verniero, who was New Jersey's
attorney general from 1994 to 1998 and is now a Supreme Court justice.

Allegations that the state engaged in racial profiling were beginning to
surface in court complaints at the time of his confirmation, but Mr.
Verniero testified that he had no statistical knowledge of the practice.
Since then, the state has acknowledged that the practice was common among
state police officers patrolling the New Jersey Turnpike.

Mr. Verniero is subject to reconfirmation in 2006, after seven years on the
bench, and William L. Gormley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said
that the justice might be called as a witness when the profiling hearings
begin in February. "What I have said all along is that no one is above the
law," Mr. Gormley said.

While the political pot simmers, the legal fallout from Monday's disclosure
that racial profiling was common knowledge among senior law enforcement
officials approached a boil.

Chuck Davis, a spokesman for Mr. Farmer, said that the attorney general
would soon review 105 criminal suits and 5 civil suits against the state
and its police to determine whether any of the arrests could be shown to
have been the result of racial profiling. That could result in the
dismissal of some criminal cases and the settlement of civil suits.

"It doesn't mean we're going to dismiss any or all," Mr. Davis said. "He
said he will review the cases and make a determination."

But Joel Harris, first assistant public defender, said Mr. Farmer's list
did not include 20 cases from Middlesex County alone. With them and other
cases still surfacing from other counties, Mr. Harris said, there are
probably 180 in which criminal defendants say they are victims of racial
profiling.

The cases will be considered by Judge Walter Barisonek of State Superior
Court, who has been charged by the Supreme Court with conducting all
pretrial hearings on the cases.

In each criminal case, Mr. Harris said, motorists and passengers who had
been stopped on the highway and charged with possession of contraband are
raising a racial profiling defense, maintaining that the evidence against
them is inadmissible because the practice of singling out minorities for
stops is unconstitutional.

In the civil cases, some of which are being supported by the American Civil
Liberties Union, motorists who were stopped and not charged have accused
the police of illegally singling them out because of their race or ethnicity.

Work on developing the tainted evidence defense cannot wait for Mr.
Farmer's review of the cases, Mr. Harris said.

"It would be nice if we could wait for the attorney general to review them
and make a determination," he said. "If, in fact, he dismisses all of these
we wouldn't have to go through all of the material we have. But there are
time constraints that Judge Barisonek has imposed on us, so we don't have
the liberty of waiting." The judge has set a Jan. 23 hearing on the
consolidated criminal cases.

One of the first issues that will likely come up in the hearings concerns
the exact legal status of racial profiling. Defense lawyers uniformly
maintain that the practice violates the equal protection clause of the Bill
of Rights, but Mr. Farmer on Monday said that the issue was far from clear.

This prompted State Senator Wayne R. Bryant of Camden to call for a law
explicitly outlawing the practice and setting penalties for violations of
the law.

"I think that's the only way you really end up making folks focus on this,"
Mr. Bryant said. "If you violate somebody's civil rights, you will face the
consequences."

Meanwhile, William Buckman, a defense lawyer who pioneered the racial
profiling defense in a 1996 Gloucester County case, said he had begun
hearing from prison inmates hoping to have their convictions overturned by
using the same defense.

He said he could not yet say what the prospects for overturning existing
convictions were, nor guess how many convicts in prisons might have cases
matching the pattern of the tainted traffic stop.

"I am selectively looking into these cases and my conscience dictates that
I'll get involved in some of them," Mr. Buckman said. But he said he had to
focus first on pending cases he was trying to get dismissed.

In addition, Mr. Buckman is part of a class action suit, brought in
cooperation with the A.C.L.U., on behalf of people stopped for wrongful
reasons and not charged. He said he was trying to have a court certify all
motorists stopped under potentially tainted circumstances classified as a
group, which is a prelude to bringing the widest possible case.

At any trial that results, Mr. Buckman said, he would try to use the
state's own knowledge of the practice of racial profiling to convict it.