PANEL SEEKS IMPEACHMENT PROCEEDINGS AGAINST VERNIERO

TRENTON, April 11 -- The State Senate Judiciary Committee has asked the
General Assembly to begin impeachment proceedings against Justice Peter G.
Verniero of the State Supreme Court, saying he gave false and misleading
testimony about racial profiling during his confirmation hearing.

William L. Gormley, chairman of the committee, made the request in a
confidential, 11-page letter to the Assembly speaker, Jack Collins; the
letter, dated Tuesday, quickly fell into the hands of reporters. In it, Mr.
Gormley ticked off seven instances in which he said Justice Verniero, the
former state attorney general, had made false statements to the committee
and four cases in which he had given misleading answers.

Mr. Collins, who is the only one who can decide whether the Assembly will
consider the matter, was engaged in the marathon negotiations over state
legislative reapportionment today and said he would not disclose his
response until next week at the earliest.

"I looked at it long enough to see that it was signed and I put it down,"
Mr. Collins said this evening. "So everybody in the state has read it
except me."

Mr. Gormley's request ratchets up the pressure on Justice Verniero, who has
rejected calls for his resignation.

A week ago the full 11-member committee, both Republicans and Democrats,
sent a letter to Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco asking him to request
Justice Verniero's resignation. The next day Mr. DiFrancesco, a Republican
like Justice Verniero and Mr. Gormley, did so. He added that he would ask
the Senate, where he also presides as president, to censure Justice
Verniero if he failed to resign. He also raised the prospect of impeachment.

By appealing directly to Mr. Collins for impeachment proceedings, Mr.
Gormley has upped the pressure.

Impeachment must originate with the Assembly, which after a trial can vote
articles of impeachment. The articles would then be sent to the Senate,
where a two-thirds vote would be required to remove Justice Verniero.

One reason for the rapid jumps from talk of resignation to censure to
impeachment is the May 15 expiration of the statute of limitations for
impeachable offenses committed by Mr. Verniero as attorney general.

Mr. Collins was careful not to reveal his thinking on impeachment. But he
did spell out some of the considerations that would go into his decision by
asking a question Mr. Gormley's letter did not directly address. "If we're
going to impeach a sitting member of the Supreme Court of the State of New
Jersey based on what he did as attorney general," Mr. Collins said, "then
we have to decide if what he did then disqualifies him from what he's doing
now, sitting as a justice."

The committee's conclusions, as described in Mr. Gormley's letter, rest
principally on discrepancies between Mr. Verniero's testimony at his
confirmation hearing on May 6, 1999, and the testimony he and his aides and
state police officials gave to the committee.

Much of the committee's accusations are familiar, and include the charge
that Mr. Verniero lied when he testified at this confirmation hearing that
he had only started compiling data on racial profiling in 1998, contrary to
recent testimony by others who said the data was available years earlier.

Among other points, the committee also accused Mr. Verniero of withholding
information about the existence of racial profiling from minority motorists
who were seeking to have contraband seized in traffic stops quashed as
evidence on grounds that they had been victims of racial profiling.