DIFRANCESCO CONSIDERS URGING VERNIERO TO LEAVE COURT

TRENTON, April 3 — Acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco said tonight that he
would consider urging Justice Peter G. Verniero, who is at the center of a
State Senate inquiry into racial profiling by the state police, to step
down from the State Supreme Court.

In his first public comments on Mr. Verniero's role in the racial profiling
controversy, Mr. DiFrancesco responded to reports that members of the
Senate Judiciary Committee had asked for Mr. Verniero's resignation. Some
committee members contend that Mr. Verniero gave misleading accounts of his
response, when he was state attorney general, to complaints that minority
drivers were being singled out for traffic stops on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Mr. DiFrancesco said he was troubled by "allegations that he wasn't as
candid as he should have been," and would tell the committee in a day or
two whether he would press Mr. Verniero to resign.

After 13 hours of questioning last Wednesday, Mr. Verniero was chastised by
the committee's chairman, Senator William L. Gormley, who said he was
dissatisfied with the testimony and asked Mr. Verniero to return.
Yesterday, Mr. Verniero said he would not appear again.

In testimony today, Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. released data
showing that black drivers are still more likely than white drivers to
undergo searches on the turnpike, and that in searches they are half as
likely to be found with contraband.

Mr. Farmer acknowledged the continuing disparities in traffic stops and
searches, and he described a chasm between the state police and civil
rights advocates that "has been painful to live and now to relive."

The committee met with Mr. DiFrancesco today after hearing from Mr. Farmer
and the state police superintendent, Col. Carson Dunbar. Senator Gormley
would say only that the committee had briefed the acting governor on the
hearings.

But in an interview tonight with radio station NJ-FM (101.5), Mr.
DiFrancesco said, "Most of the Judiciary Committee members are upset by the
sequence of events, by the timing of all this, what was said or not said."

Much of the testimony in the hearings has focused on Mr. Verniero's quick
reversal on racial profiling, which he had not acknowledged for more than
two years, in the weeks after he was nominated to the Supreme Court in
1999. In his confirmation hearings, he said his office had begun to collect
data about a year earlier; by some other accounts, the office had
statistical evidence of discrimination by the state police as early as 1996.

Mr. DiFrancesco said he was reviewing materials given to him by the
committee. Asked whether he would urge Mr. Verniero to resign if he was
convinced that the justice was not fit to serve, he said, "I'm going
through that process now."

Mr. Farmer testified today that the federal monitors who have been
overseeing the state police for two years were pleased with the steps taken
to discourage profiling, and he promised, "I want to get this right."

Still, the data he released today were similar to those reported two years
ago by Mr. Verniero's office, and they show only modest improvement from
those found in sketchy surveys from 1994 to 1996. The state police gathered
those statistics after a judge found "de facto racial profiling" on the
turnpike; many witnesses in the current hearings have tried to explain why
that information remained in a file drawer in the attorney general's office
for three years.

When asked whether the disparities in the new data demonstrated racial
profiling, Mr. Farmer said, "Looks that way to me."

The survey found that last year, black drivers accounted for 32 percent of
turnpike stops and 46 percent of searches, while white drivers accounted
for 54 of the stops and 27 percent of the searches, and Hispanic drivers
for 8 percent of the stops and 25 percent of the searches.

In 1995, according to one state police internal survey covering only the
southern part of the turnpike, black and Hispanic drivers made up 62
percent of those undergoing consent searches. Another sampling, reported in
a memo that warned, "We are in a very bad spot," found that much higher
percentages were minorities.

But at least in last year's data, the percentage of searches yielding
criminal evidence is much higher for whites: 25 percent for white drivers,
13 percent for black drivers and 5 percent for Hispanic drivers.

Several members of the Senate committee, pointing out that the police are
apparently focusing on drivers who are less likely to be carrying
contraband, suggested an end to searches without probable cause.

Those searches, called consent searches because a trooper must get a
driver's permission first, are considered a better indicator of racial
discrimination than the rate at which drivers are stopped. In New Jersey, a
consent search requires a reasonable suspicion of contraband.

Even though a driver signs a form, said Senator John A. Lynch, a Democratic
committee member, "It's a ruse; it's not consent at all."