NEW JERSEY PROSECUTORS CITE RACIAL PROFILING IN DISMISSAL OF 86 CRIMINAL CASES

NEWARK - Continuing a purge of cases tainted by racial profiling, state
prosecutors decided today to dismiss criminal charges in 86 cases involving
people who said that state troopers singled them out because of their race.

The cases, some of which go back more than a decade, include 29 in which
defendants were already convicted and some in which prison sentences were
being served. Today's dismissals brought the total number of cases dropped
because of profiling to more than 150.

State officials began examining select cases and reviewing appeals shortly
after the April 1998 shooting of four black and Latino men during a traffic
stop -- an incident that raised public awareness of allegations that state
police officers pulled people over simply because of their race.

Prosecutors had been ordered by Judge Walter R. Barisonek of Superior Court
to hand over documents today further outlining the ways in which troopers
engaged in racial profiling. Instead of producing those documents, Attorney
General David Samson dismissed the cases.

"All of these dismissals are being made in the interests of justice," the
deputy attorney general, Paul H. Heinzel, wrote in a six-page letter.

All of the dismissed cases were related to charges involving drugs, weapons
or other forms of contraband, prosecutors said. Any convictions will be
purged from the defendants' records, prosecutors said.

The dismissals were welcomed by lawyers representing those who have said
they were singled out because of racial profiling.

"Some of these are pending criminal cases, and some of these involve people
who have been convicted," said William Buckman, a lawyer who represents
some of those affected by today's decision. "For instance, one of my
clients has been in prison for eight years, and this is going to vacate the
indictment."

That client is Emory Gibson, a Maryland man who has been in the East Jersey
State Prison in Rahway since his 1994 conviction of possession with intent
to distribute cocaine.

Mr. Buckman said troopers found cocaine in the locked trunk of a car in
which Mr. Gibson was a passenger. Mr. Gibson was convicted in part, Mr.
Buckman said, because of the testimony of a state police expert in drug
interdiction who tied the drugs to him.

"It was a classic profile stop; they were literally two-tenths of a mile
from the Delaware Memorial Bridge," Mr. Buckman said.

A review found that the troopers who stopped Mr. Gibson and two other men
stopped minorities almost exclusively, Mr. Buckman said.

The dismissals infuriated Kenneth J. McClelland, the president of the state
troopers' fraternal association. "Dismissing these cases is a dangerous
mistake and is yet another insult from this administration against New
Jersey's state police," Mr. McClelland said. "I have no doubt that these
troopers acted properly and that these arrests were a victory for the
public's safety."

Mr. McClelland attributed the dismissals to politics. "The state is going
to put drug dealers and thugs who were found to be breaking the law back on
the streets, based on nothing but political correctness," he said.

The dismissals came barely three months after federal monitors released a
report indicating that troopers were making gains in ending profiling.