NJ municipal courts treat you like an ATM: Is it justice or a shakedown?

It took John Alexander more than nine years to get back the $200 a municipal court judge ordered seized from his personal belongings.

The Trenton city judge ordered the court officer to rifle through a manila folder that contained Alexander's wallet and a check for $200. Alexander's property was placed in the folder by police when he was arrested in 2009 and his cash converted to a government check for safekeeping. The $200 check was now in the judge's hands, ready to be turned over to the city.

Alexander, though, didn't owe the court a dime. His case had been overturned on appeal, records showed, but remained on the books for years, prompting police to keep picking him up and bringing him to court to pay off a phantom debt.

"I said to the judge, 'You just took my money. You have no right to do that,'" Alexander said. The judge just told him to take up the case with a public defender. The court didn't send him a $200 refund until this year. See the video below to hear Alexander's story.

Alexander is one of hundreds of thousands of people each year who face questionable justice in municipal courts across the state, a system the state's highest jurist ordered reviewed by a top panel of experts.

Attorneys and legal experts say the disparity is driven by the "incestuous" relationship between municipal court judges, prosecutors, police and local officials — all fueled by money for town coffers. The quest for revenue is so great that the courts sometimes put process above fairness, those inside and outside of the system told the Asbury Park Press.

One municipal court judge pleaded guilty in criminal court in February to falsifying public records so the towns that appointed him would get more of the penalty money from defendants than the county or state governments. Judge Richard B. Thompson was so well-known in municipal circles for bringing home the bacon for town treasuries that he won appointments in nine towns, enabling him to cobble together various part-time salaries that added up to $217,000 in 2014, his last full year on the bench.

The Press's 2016 investigation, "Inside the Municipal Court Cash Machine," exposed how the state's municipal courts helped cash-strapped towns use residents as human ATMs.

"Everyone is aware of the problem, but no one wants to address it," said Robert Pinizzotto, a former municipal prosecutor, certified municipal court attorney and a member of the subcommittee that wrote a scathing report on the courts for the New Jersey State Bar Association in 2017. "I think what's happening is we're close to a day of reckoning. The flaws are varied and many. In this particular case, money is the root of all evil."

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The bar study concluded that the municipal courts are in crisis and that under the current system, judges can't be impartial and make decisions independent from the influence of the towns that hire them.

In April, Chief Justice Stuart Rabner publicly stated that courts should not be money-making vehicles for towns and that defendants should not be jailed if they cannot pay a fine. Rabner noted that a young Ocean County man who showed up in court to fight a ticket without money was sent to jail for five days by a local judge in Burlington County for a $239 fine.

“Systemically, they’re designed for failure and they don’t work very well," said Peter Lederman, of Freehold, a former prosecutor and attorney who has been practicing in New Jersey since the late 1970s. "It takes someone who is really strong, someone is self-assured and not afraid of losing their job, to do the right thing many times over again."

Some lawmakers have cried for reform, but 18 months after the Press' initial report, and Judge Thompson's conviction, the status quo remains.

And it's not like the problems in the local courts happened overnight.

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Nearly a half-century ago, a 1971 report commissioned by the state judiciary identified the same problems that are being pointed out by the Press and legal community today. Solutions then, as now, were ignored.

Towns rely on court revenue from fines and fees from tickets, municipal ordinance violations and disorderly persons arrests to pad their local budgets. But then judges, who are appointed every three years by the governing body of the town they work in, are beholden to the very officials who decide the fate of their appointments.

The 2017 bar association report found there's a "crisis" in the municipal court system because the public lacks confidence in the independence and integrity of the judiciary. The public's perception has been eroded because of the "pervasive bias" toward the police and the municipalities' reliance on court revenue.

"If judge Joe Blow keeps finding people not guilty, some police officers might take personal umbrage," said John J. Novak, a municipal court attorney, member of the Barnegat Township Committee and a former New Jersey State Trooper. "Nobody likes to be wrong."

Chief Justice Rabner assembled a task force in 2017 to study the municipal court system in light of Thompson's misdeeds, but the results haven't yet been released. Rabner declined an interview with the Press.

"Each defendant is entitled to have his or her case decided on the merits," Rabner wrote in an April 17 letter to all judges. "That any punishment imposed should reflect the defendant's conduct and history; and that incarceration should only be ordered if the circumstances of the case require it."

Lederman, a DWI attorney in Freehold, said there's too much of a direct relationship between fines, arrests, summonses and revenue.

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"Is the job to do justice? Or is the job to provide revenue? Or is the job to move cases as quickly as possible?" he said. "It’s obvious to anybody who spends any time in the court system that while there are some people who do an outstanding job, as prosecutors, judges, public defenders — the system has serious structural problems that require reform.”

Two major forces dominate municipal courts: the entity that appoints judges and law enforcement, the Press found in its 2016 investigation, a conclusion shared by the 2017 bar association report.

When both forces combine, they can create the need for local government to rely on revenue generated by the courts, and for law enforcement to use the "power of arrest" to generate revenue for local government, the bar report stated.

"It's not just a perception, but a legal reality," said Elizabeth Trinidad, a Bridgeton-based municipal court and immigration attorney for 18 years. "They get too cozy. It's a problem."

Due process becomes hindered when law enforcement and courts work in close proximity, Trinidad said. There should be a "wall" between impartial justice and those who enforce the law, but those barriers are broken in New Jersey's municipal courts, she said.

In public forums held by the bar association as part of the municipal court study, former judges testified that they feared alienation from the police if they rendered "not guilty" findings.

Trinidad said one of the most extreme examples of police and judicial overlap was when a clerk in the Delran Municipal Court insisted that her client — who had been charged with a disorderly persons offense — be officially arrested and processed before he could see the judge that day.

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Trinidad said she told the clerk that there's no reason for the court to concern itself with a police matter, and so the proceeding before the judge went on as it would have. The case was adjudicated that day.

But when Trinidad's client got to the window to pay the fine, the court clerk called the police and he was arrested anyway.

"That was one of the most unfair and unbelievable things out of hundreds of unfair and unbelievable things that have happened," Trinidad said.

In some courts, police officers take on the role of the prosecutor and negotiate pleas with defendants or are present when prosecutors are negotiating pleas, according to testimony from the bar association's report.

Trinidad has also seen police officers serve as language translators between judges and defendants.

"I need not tell you how intimidating it would be for a Spanish speaker, who maybe doesn't even have immigration status, to be in court next to a police officer in a uniform and armed with a firearm functioning as the interpreter," Trinidad said.

Alexander, the 53-year-old Trenton resident, was arrested the day the judge took his $200 — on Oct. 13, 2009 — in Bordentown for a Trenton warrant that shouldn't have been issued. The arrest for contempt was related to a 2006 disorderly person charge that had been overturned by appeal 10 months earlier.

But the courts didn't care. Alexander called it a "shakedown."

“I was outraged," he said. "But there wasn’t very much I could do standing in the court because they still had the handcuffs on me.”

Alexander endured 11 wrongfully issued warrants for his arrest over a period of 12 years since his original arrest in 2006. Finally, in 2018, he wrote a letter to the courts asking that the case be disposed of. They sent back the $200 that was wrongfully taken from him nine years earlier.

Pinizzotto, the retired prosecutor and municipal attorney, said it's improper and "insane" for a judge to take money from a defendant in court.

"There are judges that believe they can do whatever they want because they’re in good stead with the elected officials and the police departments, who will continually reappoint them," said Pinizzotto said.

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More than 75 percent of municipal court cases are resolved through some kind of plea agreement, according to court statistics. In 2015, only 2 percent of defendants chose to go to trial, and of those, 16 percent won their cases.

"Every single court session starts with this announcement to the general public about the burden of proof," Trinidad said. "But it's a joke. No one believes it. It's very sad."

Pinizzotto said if a person is innocent until proven guilty, how can municipalities anticipate revenue from the municipal court in their annual budgets? The Press found in 2016 that courts in Monmouth and Ocean counties raised more than $26 million in revenue, with several Shore towns counting on the revenue for at least 5 percent of their budgets.

"It overwhelmingly just puts a stench over all proceedings because municipal court judges are more apt to convict people than not," he said.

The longtime attorney has made it his cause to advocate for municipal court reform. He tried to challenge the legality of the state's municipal courts in 2016, but the New Jersey Supreme Court declined to hear his case.

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Pinizzotto argued his client, who was convicted of driving while intoxicated, didn't get a fair trial in Somers Point Municipal Court in Atlantic County because the municipal judiciary lacks independence from the towns they serve. The actual existence and perception of judicial independence are required by the due process clause in the U.S. Constitution, Pinizzotto wrote in his petition to the court.

According to the case:

Municipal judges are subject to the political and financial whims of municipal elected officials

Financial issues in municipal courts are intertwined with every facet of the judicial process, including the appointment of judges and professionals, the salaries of judges and employees and the funding of police departments.

The New Jersey Supreme Court noted in a 1971 decision that although the municipal courts had improved, the structure "remains unsound" and the "antiquated system" of local courts "cannot inspire the confidence with which the public approaches our county courts." Few changes have been made since the court expressed its opinion in the decision.

The pressures judges face to maintain revenue are "real, significant and documented."

The issues in Pinizzotto's lawsuit and in the bar association report are similar to those found nearly a half-century ago in a report commissioned by the courts called "Merging Municipal Courts."

Pinizzotto found in his research that the drafters of the 1947 New Jersey Constitution, which created the municipal courts as they are today, warned about the shortcomings of the municipal court system if left in the hands of locally elected officials.

Fewer than 25 years later, the 1971 courts report also found that local judges can't be impartial when they're beholden to municipal officials. The report recommended merging the local courts into the state court system.

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The 1971 report also found:

Judges in a questionnaire acknowledged instances of the direct influence of political pressure on their court conduct.

A municipal court judge, regardless of personal ability or integrity, is responsive to his or her authority — the local governing body.

The abuses of the judicial process would be minimized by isolating the judge from the direct control of the community that must be judged objectively.

Even though the state technically oversees the municipal courts, its influence on local courts is "remote and inconsequential." Chief Justice Joseph Weintraub at the time said: "It is idle and incongruous to charge the Supreme Court with administrative supervision as the Constitution does while the capacity to frustrate effective supervision and performance remains with 587 autonomous bodies."

Part-time staffing with increasing caseloads poses a threat to the quality of judicial deliberations. Additional hiring, or giving staff more working hours, would likely put a strain on municipal budgets.

There were wide discrepancies in pay for judges and staff from court to court.

The legal community says that the "hodgepodge" of justice from court to court also affects the ability of municipal courts to administer justice. They lack uniformity in procedure and sentencing.

Pinizzotto recalled one Atlantic County judge who would put defendants in jail if they were accused of traveling a certain amount over the speed limit. But in the next town over, you could plea to a no-point ticket.

"The human variable is always going to be there," said Trinidad, a municipal court attorney who supports reform. "But right now everything is so idiosyncratic and depends on the judge, the municipality, the venue. If you're driving in New Jersey, the outcomes shouldn't be so incredibly dependent on where you happen to have been pulled over."

For at least five years, Thompson altered the designation of fines in all nine of the towns he served: Bradley Beach, Colts Neck, Eatontown, Middletown, Neptune City, Oceanport, Rumson, Tinton Falls and Union Beach, ripping off the county out of more than a half-million dollars, prosecutor's office charged.

The Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office conducted a two-year investigation into Thompson's misdeeds. As part of a deal, he pleaded to fourth-degree falsifying records and was admitted into the state pretrial intervention program, which means the charge will be dropped and potentially expunged if he stays out of trouble for one year.

The state law and the court rules governing the program, however, indicate a presumption against admitting public officials into the pretrial program if their crimes touched their offices.

"I'm comfortable with the decision we made here," Monmouth County Prosecutor Christopher Gramiccioni told the Press. "Our collective opinion here is we would take this plea arrangement, which was sufficient to capture the criminal conduct. He conceded to everything we wanted him to in terms of allocution. In terms of presenting for (more significant charges), we would have had serious evidentiary challenges. That's what it boiled down to."

Thompson didn't get any jail time, and doesn't have to pay restitution, but cannot hold public office again. As part of the pretrial intervention program, he has to complete 50 hours of community service, submit to mandatory drug tests and pay $250 for various fines and fees imposed by the court.

Gramiccioni said the records Thompson altered wouldn't be reflected on anyone's criminal or driving record. He only changed where the money was sent.

For motor vehicle violation fines, Thompson would change the designation to "contempt of court," which would ensure that the town got 100 percent of the fine instead of splitting it with the county, Gramiccioni said.

In legal documents, Thompson said he redirected the money to keep his judgeships and "curry favor" with the towns, Gramiccioni said. But, there was "limited evidence" that he had any kind of direct arrangement with the towns. Gramiccioni said they weren't able to charge him with official misconduct because there wasn't any way to prove that he moved the money for personal gain.

"We did a very thorough investigation, and what we never found is that he obtained a direct tangible benefit," the prosecutor said. "We didn't see any evidence that he personally profited from this scheme. And that played a decision in what we ended up charging this."

Records show county officials didn't think the financial loss was enough to try to recover the money from the local towns. How much each town gained, however, remains unknown. The state Administrative Office of the Courts said it doesn't keep track of that information beyond 13 months.

The Office of Attorney Ethics is expected to conduct a review as to whether Thompson, of Middletown, will be able to continue practice law, but no formal action has been taken. Thompson has declined to comment on his criminal case.

Thompson applied for his pension on a May 1 retirement, and the state pension trustees who will review his case are aware of the charges against him, according to the Division of Pension and Benefits. The public hearing on Thompson's pension will likely be in June. If no action is taken, he could qualify for a maximum pension of $106,773 a year.

Trinidad said she's not putting any blame on particular prosecutors, judges or municipalities. The system itself is broken.

"We need to find a way to do justice better," Trinidad said.

"Everything is an us-versus-them," said John Novak, the municipal court attorney, former municipal prosecutor and trooper. "(Municipal courts) need to be professionalized, so that there's a greater likelihood that constitutional protections are taken seriously. It cannot be this income-generating machine — this tax — that municipalities rely on."