- Warning that law enforcers have no right to suspend the
normal workings of democracy even after attacks such as those of Sept.
11, a New Jersey state court judge ruled March 26 that county jail
authorities
could not keep secret the names of aliens detained on immigration charges
for the federal government.
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- The ruling, though it was immediately appealed and
stayed,
was the first clear victory for the American Civil Liberties Union in its
efforts to learn the identities of Muslim men detained in secret since
Sept. 11, and to open closed-door immigration hearings. The majority of
post-Sept. 11 detainees have been kept in New Jersey on immigration
violations,
housed in Hudson and Passaic county jails under contract with the U.S.
Immigration and Naturalization Service.
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- The ACLU had brought four such suits nationally but until
last week the civil rights organization had seen only limited success,
obtaining a list of blacked-out names of detainees from the federal
district
court in Washington, D.C.
-
- On the ninth floor of a Hudson County, N.J., courthouse
shrouded in daylong fog and rain, Superior Court Judge Arthur D'Italia
said that the public has a right to county jail records under N.J.S.A.
30:8-16 (written in 1898) and N.J.A.C. 10A:31-6.5, both of which detail
records that must be made available for public inspection, with few
exceptions
or qualifications.
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- "The legislative purpose is to prevent secret
arrests,"
D'Italia said. He noted that no matter how awful the events of Sept. 11,
nor how pressing the government's investigation of the attacks, the federal
government was still required to obey the law. "Nothing is easier
for the government to assert that the disclosure of the arrest of X
interferes
with the investigation of Y."
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- During oral arguments, D'Italia made it plain to both
sides that he wanted "common sense" to prevail. The motions
required
him to sift through at least four sets of statutes and regulations, framed
between 1989 and 1997, some of which stood in contradiction to each
oth
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