Chief Justice Stuart Rabner of the New Jersey State Supreme Court recently issued an order to set up hearings to consider the dismissal of unresolved cases involving minor municipal offenses more than 15 years old.
The court says that there are hundreds of thousands of cases involving minor municipal offenses that are open and have not been prosecuted. Among them are nearly 800,000 open warrants from 1986 to 2003 for failure to appear in cases such as parking violations, minor motor vehicle offenses and local ordinance violations.
A 2016 U.S. Department of Justice report found that issuing arrest warrants for missed court
appearances or failure to pay fines and fees, particularly against indigent individuals, did not
ensure equal justice.
“Those old outstanding complaints and open warrants in minor matters raise questions of fairness, the appropriate use of limited public resources by law enforcement and the courts, the ability of the state to prosecute cases successfully in light of how long matters have been pending and the availability of witnesses, and administrative efficiency,” Rabner said in his order.
Under the order, a three-judge panel will conduct a series of hearings in the northern, central
and southern part of the state to give people the opportunity to argue that these cases should not be dismissed.
Offenses such as driving while intoxicated, reckless driving, major traffic violations, disorderly and petty disorderly persons offenses and indictable offenses will not be eligible for dismissal.
Senior supervising attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey, Alexander Shalom, said in one interview that open warrants are keeping many residents from leading normal lives and are unfair.
“If someone committed a disorderly persons offense decades ago and has done nothing since, what is the public safety interest in holding them to account for a couple of hundred dollar fine,” he said. “It simply doesn’t advance public safety and we know how much it harms individuals and their communities and their ability to fully integrate into society.”
