NJ Gov. Asked for Profiling Records

Tuesday, November 21st 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) â€” Gov. Christie Whitman's office is the latest target of a legislative committee's expanding investigating into the State Police and allegations of racial profiling.

A former federal prosecutor hired by the state Senate Judiciary Committee has asked for any records Whitman's office kept that deal with racial profiling, the committee's Republican chairman said Monday.

Earlier this month the committee broadened its inquiry to include the state's prosecution of two troopers after a judge dismissed criminal charges against the pair for a shooting on the New Jersey Turnpike.

The April 1998 traffic stop that ended in gunfire provoked the state's racial profiling controversy.

The committee wants all the paperwork detailing the attorney general's decision to indict troopers John Hogan and James Kenna. The two were cleared Oct. 31 by a judge who accused prosecutors of misconduct and a former state attorney general of bowing to political pressure. That ruling is under appeal.

Included in the committee's latest request are ``all documents regarding communications'' about those troopers between the attorney general's staff and Whitman's office, according to a letter from a committee lawyer.

Legislators are expecting as many as 80,000 pages of records from the attorney general's office dating back to 1985. Attorney General John J. Farmer Jr. has said all of that information will be made public by Nov. 28.

``If they have anything in or around the time under review, we want to see it. It's a logical extension and one we have been thinking of doing for some time,'' Republican state Sen. William L. Gormley said.

Committee members have no specific documents in mind or any knowledge that Whitman's staff maintained internal reports, memos or other records not included in the material Farmer will provide, Gormley said.

This new request by attorney Michael Chertoff, a former U.S. attorney, is basically the same made of Farmer, Gormley said.

``We don't want people to say we didn't ask,'' Gormley said.

Whitman's office had not received the letter late Monday afternoon, spokesman Pete McDonough said.

``We'll respond to it when we get the letter,'' McDonough said.

State officials repeatedly denied the practice of racial profiling until it was acknowledged in an April 1999 report by then-Attorney General Peter Verniero, now a state Supreme Court justice.

Hogan and Kenna could face federal charges of violating the civil rights of the four minority men in a van they had stopped for speeding.