Issue 211: State's highest court to rule on JCPD records fight
Plus: Volunteer at historic Speer Cemetery and check out Peach Pie Fest at Riverview Fisk!
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State's highest court to rule on JCPD records fight
The highest court in New Jersey is expected to issue a decision Monday that could fundamentally alter how journalists hold public officials — specifically police — accountable in the Garden State.
And our fair city is right at the heart of the case.
New Jersey Monitor reported that Jersey City Police Department Lieutenant Michael Timmins was hosting a party at his Sussex County home in 2019.
Things get a little intense over leftovers. Fruit was allegedly thrown. Timmins, who authorities said had six to eight beers, got a shotgun and fired off a few rounds in the vicinity of some guests who, somehow or another, overstayed their welcome, per New Jersey Monitor. No one was physically hurt.
From New Jersey Monitor:
State police responded and charged Timmins with terroristic threats and possession of weapons for unlawful purposes, but Timmins went through a pretrial diversionary program that enabled him to get details of his arrest expunged.
The New Jersey Monitor obtained details of Timmins’ gun arrest in 2021 after prosecutors divulged them as exculpatory material in an unrelated murder case.
In March 2022, the state Supreme Court ruled that public officials must release police disciplinary records in New Jersey, under the state’s common law right of access, when the public’s interest in them outweighs an officer’s confidentiality concerns. The New Jersey Monitor consequently sought Timmins’ records under that ruling.
A reporter finds buried information, immediately recognizes the public impact and, on behalf of anyone who interacts with the JCPD, starts to ask what the hell and why?
(P.S. If you haven’t heard of New Jersey Monitor, it’s a vital news source for New Jersey and it’s run by Terrence McDonald of the late Jersey Journal [rest in print]. If you have the means, please consider donating.)
If Terrence and reporter Dana DiFilippo hadn’t found information from an unconnected criminal case, this officer’s ballistic barbecue may have gone unnoticed forever. But the incident led to more questions:
“We should probably just try to get more information about this case, because this is an an alarming episode,” Terrence said, recalling the case in an interview this week. “We should find out, you know, more about this cop who shot his gun at people after authorities say he had up to eight beers.”
On March 18, 2022, New Jersey Monitor filed an open public records act, or OPRA, request. On April 25, the Jersey City Police Department sent its regrets, saying it would not oblige.
“Yeah, so we sued,” Terrence said.
The lawsuit was filed in June. New Jersey Monitor is represented by CJ Griffin, a partner at Pashman Stein Walder Hayden and director of the firm’s Justice Gary S. Stein Public Interest Center.
Two months later, the case entered a legal wormhole. Since Timmins was a first-time offender, he pleaded to a lesser charge, went through pre-trial intervention and, two months after the lawsuit, had his record expunged, according to the New Jersey Monitor.
“ As far as the Sussex County prosecutor's office is concerned, this guy has no criminal record,” Terrence said. “But we all know as the public that he was accused of doing this and was charged with a crime.”
JCPD Internal Affairs looked into Timmins’ case and he received a 90-day suspension, according to court records.
The question New Jersey Monitor is asking: How did the JCPD conduct its inquiry? How dit it come to this decision? Were JCPD policies applied fairly? Was the discipline comparable to similar cases? Are different officers being treated differently?
Jersey City says releasing the details of their internal investigation would be illegal as such an act would be an unlawful disclosure of expunged charges. The officer went through a legal process and his record was erased. It would violate his rights to have the details of his now invisible criminal charges, many of which were already disclosed, disclosed.
But before we get to tomorrow’s big decision, we have to look at another big decision in the public records legal maelstrom of New Jersey. This time involving our Union County neighbors.
Picture it: Elizabeth, 2019 …
Police Director James Cosgrove was accused by staff of using “racist and sexist language to refer to employees on multiple occasions,” per court records. Cosgrove resigned and, a couple months later, a man named Richard Rivera sued for records regarding how the Elizabeth Police Department and Union County Prosecutors handled the case. The records are denied. CJ Griffin argues the case before Hon. James Hely, a Union County judge and longtime lawyer.
Hely ruled the department should have released records regarding EPD’s disciplinary process, under OPRA. Elizabeth appealed. The appellate division reversed and Rivera appealed.
The case went to the state Supreme Court which ruled that the public has a right to know how the City of Elizabeth disciplines its police director, as long as witnesses and affected employees are redacted. But that right exists under “common law” access to public records, not OPRA, as Hely ruled.
We asked Hely, who is now retired, to weigh in.
“ I based my decision on the New Jersey Open Public Records Act. And that had a proviso that it didn't apply to internal police affairs investigations, which has always been a very hot, contentious issue,” Hely told us.
“The cops always want to cover up bad cops,” he added. “The whole mentality, particularly in the cities where there are large police departments and a powerful police union, they never want to give any of these internal affairs things.”
The state Supreme Court ruled that under “common law” — a legal default to very basic rights in an open society that date back centuries in England and the U.S. — citizens have an inherent right to see government records if there’s a compelling public interest.
“It was kind of a way around for the Supreme Court to say … under the common law, it's a weighing process,” he said.
Fast forward to Monday’s expected decision, also being argued by CJ Griffin.
“This case falls into a little tiny crack,” Hely said. Timmins’ conduct, which no one is disputing, occurred in Sussex County. But he works in Jersey City. Jersey City denied the request, “claiming the matter did not relate to concerns about public trust related to bias or dishonesty,” the state Appellate Court wrote in a decision summary of the case.
Hely said the expungement is a separate legal question than the access to Timmins’ disciplinary records. He emphasized that he can only speculate as to the Supreme Court’s decision, but he was pretty bullish on New Jersey Monitor’s chances.
“I think that the Supreme Court is going to say ‘No, that's not expunged. The internal review was over his conduct. We don't care if he was arrested or not, or prosecuted or not. That's a separate proceeding than his arrest record and the investigation that was done in Sussex County.”
Stay tuned to New Jersey Monitor for the court’s ruling tomorrow (Monday).
Neighborhood Character: Jennifer King
Know someone who’s got a cool story or is having a big impact in the community? Please email us at neighborhoodcharacter@gmail.com.
This week we caught up with Jennifer King, the president of the nonprofit Friends of Speer Cemetery (145 Vroom Street). In 2005, Jennifer moved to Jersey City from New York and found an apartment on the corner of Bergen Ave and Vroom Street that overlooked an overgrown cemetery.
A couple years later, she was walking her dog Daisy past the cemetery and saw weeds growing through the fence and spilling onto the sidewalk. Jennifer went back to her apartment and told her husband Dan and daughter Casey that enough was enough and she was going to do some clean up starting with the weeds. “We just pulled and pulled and pulled,” she said. “The next day, Dan came and there were stones that were down, and so he lifted them up.”
That was the beginning of her more than decade-long quest to honor the dead, restore the cemetery, and create a public greenspace in McGinley Square where neighbors can relax, reflect and enjoy nature. Check out the website and their Instagram!
The story starts sometime in the 1700s: Back then Jersey City was mostly farmland. The DeMott family, who belonged to Old Bergen Church, owned the land and used it as a family burial plot, but it ended up becoming a potter’s field.
In the 1850s, Abraham and Jane Speer purchased the land to build a public cemetery. “It doesn't matter who you are, your religion, as long as you have $16, you can bury your loved one here,” said Jennifer.
But it turns out Abraham Speer “was not a very scrupulous man,” according to Jennifer. “There are bodies everywhere, and a lot of them do not have markers, so I don't think we'll ever know exactly how many people are buried in Speer.”
By 1930, it was defunct. “It was called The Forgotten Cemetery,” she said. “It took less than 100 years for me to go from him purchasing it to it being defunct all over again.”
Fast forward to the 2020s: Jennifer and local community members had been taking care of the cemetery, weeding, planting flowers, and uncovering buried headstones. They received a letter in the mail. She said it was delivered to the Vroom Street Church next door because the cemetery has no mailbox. The letter said the cemetery owed $20,000 in taxes, according to Jennifer.
A real estate developer had bought the abandoned lot from the city at auction: Friends of Speer could pay the back taxes on the land or get out. That’s where Ward C Councilman Tom Zuppa stepped in to help, which resulted in the city buying back the cemetery for $72,178.
From a 2024 Jersey Journal story:
“Zuppa said he also has worked with the city’s legal team for a year and a half to help rectify the error that put the cemetery’s liens, and potential development rights, into the hands of private owners. That error had included the property incorrectly losing its tax-exempt status, he said, and the journey to remedy it culminated Wednesday with the city council vote. Zuppa said he recently spoke to one of the buyers of a lien who asked him the feasibility of removing all of the remains from the land in order to develop it. “We’re taking back the cemetery and nobody’s going to touch it,” said Ward C Councilman Rich Boggiano. “It’s going to be preserved.”
The upcoming dig: Jennifer is driven by caring for the forgotten. “At some point there was a family crying over this grave because their loved one passed on, and they never in a million years, I'm sure, dreamed that they would be treated this way.”
On Saturday, August 9th at 9am, the Friends of Speer are hosting a “dig,” where the community is invited to help dig up buried headstones (not bodies!). Over the years, many gravestones have been knocked down and buried in mud.
Jennifer recalled a stone that was sticking out of the ground, which they thought was a footstone to mark the end of a grave. “Dan was digging down, and he called me over. He was like, Jennifer, this keeps going. So we dug the way down, and we lifted it brick by brick. That was not easy, I gotta tell you. And it was the headstone of a little boy. He was four and a half years old, Thomas, and he had passed away in 1865,” she said. “We thought it was just a footstone, like it was nothing, and it turned out that there's this little boy that's buried. It kills me because they're not forgotten.”
At the dig, volunteers will uncover, clean and reset buried headstones. The Jersey City Department of Public Works recently helped uncover the original DeMott family tomb, which had been filled in with dirt (watch a video here). The Friends of Speer will now work to clean it out and preserve it.
Mary’s Honey: Friends of Speer also works with a local beekeeper to maintain bee hives in the cemetery and the group sells raw honey named after Mary Pomeroy, who is buried at the cemetery. An organist at a local church, Mary became pregnant out of wedlock (the father was suspected to be the church pastor) and died soon after giving birth to a daughter in 1874. That’s why the hot honey is called “Mary’s Revenge.”
Final wishes: Friends of Speer is a labor of love led by Jennifer and Dan and she hopes more community members get involved. When asked how restoring a cemetery has affected her own end-of-life wishes, “I do not want to be buried at Speer,” she said. “Because I don’t know if when I pass on they’re going to keep taking care of it.”
ODDS AND ENDS
The One-Way Debate: Amy wrote a few weeks ago about the whole debacle surrounding Mayor Steve Fulop’s “plan” to make MLK and Ocean one-way streets. The people of Greenville were mightily pissed at the notion, as was Ward F Councilmember Frank Gilmore, who held an emergency public meeting to address the issue. This put Ward E Councilmember James Solomon, who’s running for mayor and is allied with Gilmore, in a bind.
From Amy:
“For years now, Solomon has been a staunch ally of bike and pedestrian safety activists. He’s one of their most revered and supported politicians, and he has been deeply involved in this issue from a number of different angles. He’s their go-to guy for bike lanes, traffic safety, and many other related local issues. Those sorts of voters love things like one-way streets, the exact sort of proposal that we’re talking about here.”
Fulop noted his displeasure that Solomon didn’t go ga-ga for his “plan” which, we must point out, remains not a plan, but a tweet. Fulop tweeted out in support of Jim McGreevey’s street safety plan and then went on to chastise Solomon who, before this week, we kind of thought Fulop was supporting. Here’s what the mayor said:
“As things stand, McGreevey is on track to be the next mayor. Unless the other candidates show some vision or courage, which they haven’t, he’ll keep gaining ground. The rest are stuck recycling tired lines: “developers bad,” “everyone’s corrupt,” “Jersey City is a mess.” with no vision beyond those talking points. Their cautiousness on every issue including MLK/Bergen and Baldwin/Summit speaks volumes about how they would lead.”
It is not Neighborhood Character’s position that there is any clear frontrunner in the mayoral election as of yet. It’s further unclear whether Fulop’s support or disdain moves the needle one way or another.
Speaking of the mayor’s race, The Jersey Vindicator’s Chelsea Pujols wrote a great summary of the candidates’ housing plans, and the state of JC’s rising rents.
Speaking of the Council race, Joyce Watterman is almost ready to announce her Ward B candidate putting her slate at a slight disadvantage to Team O’Dea and Joel Brooks who’s been running for actual years.
Wayne Mello is the new HudCo Acting Prosecutor following the retirement of Esther Suarez, per the Hudson County View.
Here’s a recap of the Ras Baraka/James Solomon fundraiser. Baraka was pretty late, per HCV, but then again he’s running another whole city.
FUN!
Epic Soul Band takes the stage at LSP tonight at 6.
There’s still time for pie! The Peach Pie fest kicks off at noon! Get on out to Riverview Fisk Park.
Pompei Pizza is hosting a secret garden party with Madame Meats tonight at 6pm. The menu includes saffron arancini and jamon calzones. DM for details here!
Feral of the Week
An upstanding member of the St. Al’s feral cat colony.
