Camden Attempting To Retrieve Internal Affairs Records From ACLU - In re Camden Police Cases, 11-cv-1315
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
Per The New Jersey Law Journal:
"Camden is trying to get back police internal affairs records that landed in the lap of a lawyer representing one of the scores of plaintiffs suing the city over alleged planting of drug evidence.
"The city has asked a federal judge for a protective order to forbid Alexander Shalom, of the American Civil Liberties Union-New Jersey, from using or possessing information from a computer disk mailed to him anonymously.
"Shalom's client, Joel Barnes, is one of 63 federal plaintiffs who allege they were wrongly charged or convicted due to police misconduct. The cases are consolidated on a master docket as In re Camden Police Cases, 11-cv-1315, and more cases are pending in state court.
"Shalom is opposing the motion, which has a July 16 return date before U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider."
***
"Shalom says the unlabeled disk arrived by mail on May 8, 2012, in an envelope that bore his own name as both addressee and sender. "After a click or two, it became clear that it was related to the Camden police" and after a few more clicks, he was "looking at things I hadn't seen before, things I wanted to have seen," Shalom says.
"Camden is trying to get back police internal affairs records that landed in the lap of a lawyer representing one of the scores of plaintiffs suing the city over alleged planting of drug evidence.
"The city has asked a federal judge for a protective order to forbid Alexander Shalom, of the American Civil Liberties Union-New Jersey, from using or possessing information from a computer disk mailed to him anonymously.
"Shalom's client, Joel Barnes, is one of 63 federal plaintiffs who allege they were wrongly charged or convicted due to police misconduct. The cases are consolidated on a master docket as In re Camden Police Cases, 11-cv-1315, and more cases are pending in state court.
"Shalom is opposing the motion, which has a July 16 return date before U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider."
***
"Shalom says the unlabeled disk arrived by mail on May 8, 2012, in an envelope that bore his own name as both addressee and sender. "After a click or two, it became clear that it was related to the Camden police" and after a few more clicks, he was "looking at things I hadn't seen before, things I wanted to have seen," Shalom says.
"At that point, he stopped reading and wrote a letter to Camden's lawyer, John Eastlack Jr. of Weir and Partners in Cherry Hill, enclosing a copy of the disk. He told Eastlack that based on a cursory review, some of the documents were relevant to the civil rights suits and responsive to plaintiffs' discovery requests but had not been produced."
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