The most powerful woman in the state Senate has accused a colleague of blocking legislation that would strengthen domestic violence laws, claiming that he told her privately he thinks many complaints are “made up.”
Senate Majority Leader and Bergen County Democrat Loretta Weinberg lobbed the verbal grenade during a virtual public hearing Monday night against Sen. Nicholas Scutari, D-Union, the chairman of the influential Senate Judiciary Committee and a municipal prosecutor.
“He said he feels most of the cases in his wide legal career have been made up,” Weinberg told members of the Workgroup on Harassment, Sexual Assault and Misogyny in New Jersey Politics, an informal group of female lobbyists, politicians and public officials, who were stunned into silence. The stalled bills would be a topic for discussion at a future workgroup meeting, she said.
Contacted by phone after the meeting he did not attend, Scutari flatly denied Weinberg’s claim.
“That’s a little shocking. I’ve never said anything like that,” Scutari told NJ Advance Media. “I don’t know what she is talking about.”
Scutari said he had no recollection of talking to Weinberg about the legislation, and that Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester had asked him to consider posting them for a future hearing.
“They are being analyzed by our counsel. If they are appropriate, they will get a hearing,” Scutari said. He said the attorney review is a common procedure for all bills that go through his committee.
Scutari noted that his extensive experience as a municipal prosecutor makes him “intimately familiar” with domestic violence laws.
He made a distinction between indictable offenses, which are more serious in nature and are heard in state Superior Court, and lesser charges that are heard in municipal court. He said he recalled putting a “a couple of people in jail” for municipal violations of domestic violence crimes, but they were the exception.
“The larger majority are dismissed at the request of both parties,” Scutari said. “I can only speak for myself, but it seems to me these cases don’t proceed at the municipal court level.”
“I just want to make sure they (the bills) have the intended consequences. You want to get the bad actors,” Scutari said.
New Jersey’s domestic violence law has long been considered one of the toughest. There are 19 criminal offenses, ranging from harassment and criminal mischief to kidnapping, sexual assault and homicide, each carrying harsher penalties if they occur in a domestic relationship.
Weinberg is serving the final six months of her 30-year career legislative career, and she says she is anxious to see these bills, sought by domestic violence victims’ advocates, reach Gov. Phil Murphy’s desk sooner than later. She said she first introduced a similar package of seven bills in 2016 but now there are only five.
Three of the bills involve expanding the training for judges, law enforcement officials, municipal prosecutors and assistant county prosecutors who special in domestic violence. One creates uniform response procedures for domestic crisis teams; another creates a batterers’ intervention program, according to information provided by Weinberg’s staff.
Weinberg shared an email she sent to Scutari’s district office, dated March 25, in which she asked him to post the bills in his committee, or if he was unwilling, “you allow them to be referenced in the Law and Public Safety Committee.”
She said she and her staff never received a response.
Weinberg said she had agreed to amend the municipal prosecutor training bill at Scutari’s request, making the training mandatory only for new prosecutors. She shared a May 25 email between her staff and members of the Senate Majority Counsel’s Office that reads: “The Senator has put in a few post requests for these bills, so the hope is that these bills will come up at an SJU (Senate Judiciary) meeting in the near future.”
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Susan K. Livio may be reached at slivio@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @SusanKLivio.
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N.J. senator says colleague is blocking domestic violence bills because he says many claims are ‘made up’ - NJ.com
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