VERNIERO ADMITS BEING LAX ON PROFILING DATA

TRENTON, March 28 — After months of speculation and investigation about his
responsibility for racial profiling in New Jersey, the state's former
attorney general, Peter G. Verniero, testified today that he continually
assigned subordinates to look into troublesome reports about the treatment
of minority drivers by the state police. But he said he rarely followed up
to learn what they had found.

"I wish I had said more," he said in testimony before the State Senate
Judiciary Committee, which is investigating the state's response to racial
profiling. "I wish I had done more. I wish I had asked more probing and
searching questions." But even the Republicans on the committee were less
than forgiving, and in a dramatic ending tonight to 13 hours of testimony,
the committee's chairman, William L. Gormley, accused Mr. Verniero of
misleading the panel during its hearings two years ago on his nomination to
the State Supreme Court. Mr. Gormley then told Justice Verniero that he
might be called back before the senators next week. When Mr. Verniero asked
to submit a written statement in lieu of questioning, Senator Gormley
leaned forward and, almost whispering, said: "Oh, no. I'm going to take it
up with the committee. We can take a vote. And my vote would be that you'd
have to come back in. O.K.?" All day, defending himself against accusations
that he had ignored evidence of racial profiling, Mr. Verniero told the
committee repeatedly that he could not remember dozens of documents that
had crossed his desk while the issue was gaining national attention.
Presented with one document after another from a period stretching from
1996 to 1999, Mr. Verniero said "I don't recall" more than 150 times before
a late-afternoon break in testimony.

His much-awaited appearance before the Judiciary Committee came after three
days of hearings in which state police officials and former aides told of
documents showing that troopers were singling out minority drivers for
stops and searches.

Mr. Verniero said today that until the highly publicized shooting of three
black and Hispanic men on the New Jersey Turnpike in April 1998, he relied
on assurances from the state police that they did not engage in racial
profiling.

He also cited the assessment of Deborah T. Poritz, who was his predecessor
as attorney general and is now the state's chief justice, that earlier
legal challenges alleging the practice were based on "junk science."

Mr. Verniero acknowledged that while he was attorney general, he worried
about a federal civil rights inquiry into profiling that began in 1996. But
he said he had no knowledge of particular memos and reports that were
supposed to be passed along to the Justice Department over the next few years.

After showing Mr. Verniero a series of memos, Michael Chertoff, the
Judiciary Committee's special counsel, paused and asked, "Did you have an
interest in finding out whether there was racial profiling going on?"

Mr. Verniero replied, "I was told in very adamant terms that it was not an
issue."

Mr. Verniero was facing the committee for the third time in two years. The
committee is revisiting a flurry of activity in the spring of 1999, when
the attorney general, a political appointee still short of his 40th
birthday, had just been nominated to the Supreme Court.

Within weeks, he changed his position on racial profiling, issuing a report
that said the practice was "real, not imagined."

He also directed deputies to move faster to obtain indictments against the
two troopers involved in the turnpike episode, withdrew an appeal of a
court ruling that had found a "de facto policy" of profiling in traffic
stops, and entered into a settlement with the Justice Department, which had
threatened to sue the state over civil rights violations.

The committee questioned Mr. Verniero in April 1999, during its first
hearings into racial profiling, and again several weeks later, when his
Supreme Court nomination went before the panel.

Two of the seven Republicans now on the panel voted against him. The full
Senate approved the nomination by one vote.

Today, Justice Verniero was questioned sharply about assertions in his
earlier testimony and in an April 1999 report on profiling that his office
did not receive some of the state police data on traffic stops and searches
until mid-March 1999.

"I believed it was accurate at the time," he said, "that there were certain
documents I had not seen."

He acknowledged that in the early stages of the Justice Department
investigation, he deleted a paragraph in a January 1997 letter to the
department that said a survey of one police station showed that troopers
were continuing to stop black drivers at disproportionately high rates.

He said he edited the letter because he thought the information was
unreliable. "I'm giving you my best guess as to what went through my mind
when I deleted this paragraph," he said.

"Of course we know, down the road, that we shouldn't have discounted that
data," he said, "but you're asking me about 1997."

He was also pressed on a meeting in May 1997 at which he and aides
discussed data on searches of minority drivers. Aides testified that Mr.
Verniero seemed to be quite familiar with the data, which were worrisome
because they showed patterns similar to those found in Maryland, where the
state police had recently come under court supervision.

"I don't recall a specific discussion of Maryland in that meeting," he
said. "This meeting has attained an almost legendary significance in these
proceedings, but for me at the time it was essentially a status meeting."

At the time, Mr. Verniero and the superintendent of the state police, Col.
Carl A. Williams, were trying to avoid a similar agreement, called a
consent decree, with the Justice Department.

Mr. Verniero maintained in his April 1999 testimony that the reality of
racial profiling began to "crystallize" in his mind — a term that he said
today was open to different interpretations — after the turnpike shooting.

Senator Gormley, in closing, gave Mr. Verniero a blistering lecture about
his answers to several questions posed during his court confirmation
hearings. Saying that it would be "far more than a mistake" to have misled
the senators about the timing of his investigations, he added: "I want you
to know, between mislead and mistake, at this moment in time, I fall:
mislead. But obviously I would want to afford you, before the end of these
hearings, the opportunity to provide whatever other facts would demonstrate
why this wasn't the case."