BAD NEWS FOR TROOPERS IS LITTLE RELIEF FOR JUDGE

A state senator planning hearings on racial profiling in New Jersey
said yesterday that the reinstatement of criminal charges against two
troopers who shot three black and Hispanic men in a turnpike stop in
1998 did not settle questions about a State Supreme Court justice who
played a role in the case.

The senator, William L. Gormley, a Republican who is chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would proceed with hearings in
late February or early March to explore questions about the role of
the justice, Peter G. Verniero, in the case and, more broadly, about
what Mr. Verniero knew of racial profiling, and when he knew it, when
he was the state's attorney general.

"We're going to proceed in a nonpartisan fashion with these
hearings," Senator Gormley, who had been a principal advocate of Mr.
Verniero's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1999, said in a
telephone interview. Justice Verniero, like Senator Gormley, is a
Republican.

Last October, a Mercer County judge dismissed the shooting charges
against Troopers John Hogan and James Kenna, saying they had been
denied rights to a fair trial because Mr. Verniero, when he was
attorney general in April 1999, had announced that a grand jury had
charged them with official misconduct at the same time that another
grand jury was still weighing evidence in the shooting.

On Friday, the Appellate Division of Superior Court reinstated the
charges, calling the findings of the lower court judge, Andrew J.
Smithson, "unfounded and unfair," and adding that there was "no
constitutional or jurisprudential doctrine that grants the judiciary
a roving commission to oversee the conduct of the attorney general's
investigations of possible criminal acts."

The three-judge appellate court delivered a lengthy defense of the
attorney general's office and, in effect, a vindication of Mr.
Verniero, saying there was no evidence that "release of the
intervening indictment was calculated to deny, or had the effect of
denying, the defendant's rights."

But Senator Gormley said yesterday that the ruling left unanswered
another question: whether Mr. Verniero's announcement of the
misconduct charges and its possibly prejudicial effect on the grand
jury hearing the shooting charges could have been avoided altogether
by sealing the first indictment until the second panel had decided
whether to return an indictment.

"The appellate ruling does not eliminate the question as to why
Verniero announced the indictment on the lesser charges in the first
place," Senator Gormley said. "It could have been sealed. If the
attorney general thought there was the potential for prejudice, why
would the announcement be made?"

Senator Gormley said his 11-member committee would also investigate
wider questions involving Mr. Verniero's knowledge of racial
profiling, a practice in which for years black and Hispanic drivers
in disproportionate numbers were illegally stopped on the highways by
state troopers searching for drugs.

Efforts to reach Justice Verniero yesterday were unavailing.

Although there had been allegations of such racial profiling for many
years, it was the 1998 shooting of the three unarmed minority men on
the turnpike by Troopers Hogan and Kenna that galvanized the issue
politically and turned it into a national issue.

Mr. Verniero, in his confirmation hearings for the high court bench
in 1999, testified that, although he was aware of allegations that
state troopers were stopping black and Hispanic drivers in inordinate
numbers, he had no detailed or statistical knowledge of the practice
until the attorney general's office conducted its own review and he
issued a report in April 1999 calling the problem "real, not
imagined."

Mr. Verniero's critics - mainly Democratic rivals, civil rights
advocates and lawyers suing the state over racial profiling -
insisted that he must have known of the practice and failed to stop
it, taking action only when Gov. Christie Whitman sent his court
nomination to the State Senate. The controversy intensified last
November when the state released 91,000 pages of internal state
records showing that 8 in 10 car searches carried out by state
troopers on the New Jersey Turnpike over the last decade involved
vehicles driven by black or Hispanic drivers.

The documents showed that systematic racial profiling had been a
routine part of state police operations. Some of the documents also
raised questions about Mr. Verniero's testimony. For example, one
memo from an assistant attorney general to Mr. Verniero in July 1997
included an audit of the Moorestown barracks, which had been the
subject of repeated complaints of racial profiling. It showed that
blacks and Hispanics made up 13.5 percent of the drivers on the
turnpike, but accounted for more than 33 percent of the traffic stops.

And while Mr. Verniero had testified that he worked in cooperation
with a United States Justice Department inquiry into profiling, a
memo about a meeting of the attorney general and his assistants in
May 1997 gave another impression of his response to the federal
investigation.

Handwritten notes indicated that he was adamantly opposed to entering
a consent decree that would let a federal monitor oversee the state
police. The notes, believed to have been written by an assistant
attorney general, quoted the attorney general as saying that before
he would sign such a decree "they'd have to tie me to a train and
drag me along the track."

Justice Verniero last month defended himself for the first time
against accusations that he misled lawmakers about the extent of his
knowledge of racial profiling. Largely reiterating earlier
assertions, he said that the evidence he saw was imprecise and
contradictory during most of his three years as attorney general, and
became conclusive only in the last weeks of his tenure, when he took
steps to stop it.

While some Democrats have spoken of impeaching Justice Verniero for
what they call his misleading testimony and failure to act sooner
against racial profiling, other legislators have insisted that
impeachment is unlikely.

Asked yesterday if Justice Verniero would be called to testify at the
Senate hearings next month, Senator Gormley, the Judiciary Committee
chairman, said he was "not going to single out any one person" who
might testify. But he said he interpreted Justice Verniero's recent
statement in defense of his conduct to be more than an attempt "to
clear the air."

The senator added, "I took that as a request to testify."