THE WITNESS IS WEARY AND HIS AUDIENCE SKEPTICAL

TRENTON, March 28 -- There were bags under Peter G. Verniero's eyes, and a
gray stubble showed on his cheeks when he was eight hours and thousands of
words into his marathon testimony on how he had handled the racial
profiling issue as attorney general. For all his efforts, few of the people
who had come to hear him seemed entirely satisfied.

Mr. Verniero, now a justice on the New Jersey State Supreme Court, was
either the star witness or the prime suspect, depending on one's point of
view. It was the fourth day of testimony in the Senate Judiciary
Committee's hearings into the way racial profiling had developed from an
ugly rumor into a calamitous legal battle while Mr. Verniero was in charge
of the Department of Law and Public Safety.

But as members of today's audience described the hearings, it seemed that
they approached the proceedings with many different views of what was
important, and each listener seemed to hear a different side of the same story.

The possibility of conflicting interpretation was neatly summed up by the
headlines in two newspapers concerning Tuesday's testimony from two of Mr.
Verniero's top aides: "2 Witnesses Criticize Verniero," said the headline
in The Record, in Hackensack. "Verniero's Ex-Deputies Defend Him," said The
Asbury Park Press.

Some listeners were disappointed that the hearings were not at all about
the practice of singling out minority drivers for traffic stops and
searches, but about how the bureaucracy handled the practice after Mr.
Verniero became attorney general more than four years ago.

"This was supposed to have been about racial profiling, but it isn't --
it's about the actions of upper management in the attorney general's
office," said Secretary of State DeForest B. Soaries Jr., one of the most
senior blacks in state government. "It's like a giant bait-and- switch."

But Ronald Thompson, president of the Garden State Bar Association, the
black bar group, said he came away from the hearings with hope from the
mere fact that a once routine police practice had been put under such
scrutiny. He said that on Tuesday night, as he was driving to his home in
West Orange, he passed a municipal patrol car on a hill that turned around
and followed him until he turned into his driveway.

"This is in my own street, in my own neighborhood," Mr. Thompson said. "So
if anyone thinks that this is just something out of the past, they should
pay more attention."

Marvin Braker, an African-American lawyer from Union Township, said he
thought the hearings could educate a wider public. "My position is that
this is not just a racial issue, it's a human rights issue, and it's a
constitutional issue," Mr. Braker said. "So this is something that all
right-thinking Americans should be thinking about, and I think the hearings
have done that."

The Rev. J. Stanley Justice, pastor of Mount Zion A.M.E. Church in Trenton,
said he thought the core truth about racial profiling had been lost in the
testimony.

"Unfortunately this has turned into a word thing -- you interpret it this
way, I interpret it that way," he said. "And I think we should be
concerning ourselves with the substance of this problem."

Mr. Justice said he was heartened by Mr. Verniero's opening statement,
which concluded with a plea for legislation outlawing racial profiling,
once and for all. "He was very clear about that, but his responses to
questions did not mirror that same frankness and exactness of his opening
words."

Members of the committee, with the benefit of 150 hours of depositions
transcribed into 4,000 pages of testimony, focused on particular elements
in Mr. Verniero's accounting. John E. Lynch of New Brunswick, the ranking
Democrat on the committee, has long complained that Mr. Verniero learned
more of politics than of the law on his way to becoming, at 41, the
youngest Supreme Court justice.

Specifically, Mr. Lynch said that Mr. Verniero mishandled a federal civil
rights investigation into the state police.

"Listen," Senator Lynch said during a break today, "if you had a
criminal-justice expert in there with an awareness of the Department of
Justice probe, this whole thing would have played out entirely differently.
There would have been a dialogue with the department instead of this mess."

As it happened, the department forced New Jersey to sign a consent decree
admitting racial profiling and promising to end it shortly after Mr.
Verniero left office.