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The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that law-enforcement officers cannot stop people just because they fit the race and gender of a suspect, in a unanimous ruling that reinforces the state’s 2005 ban on racial profiling in policing.

The case involved a police stop made after a 7-Eleven was robbed in May 2011. The court overturned the conviction of one man and upheld the vacated sentence of another.

When the 7-Eleven was robbed, according to court records, Sgt. Mark Horan of the Hamilton Township Police Department received a dispatch about the crime and was told that the suspects were “two Black males, one with a handgun.”

Horan drove toward the 7-Eleven. When he was 0.75 miles away, he shined a light on two cars driving by; the second one had three Black men inside. Horan stopped the car because the men didn’t react to the light, because there were at least two Black men inside the vehicle and it was short distance from the 7-Eleven.

‘Veil of suspicion’

While the men were involved with the crime and pleaded guilty, the Supreme Court ruled that race and gender were too “vague” of a descriptor to implicate someone of a crime.

Associate Justice Fabiana Pierre-Louis wrote for a unanimous high court that the information “effectively placed every single Black male in the area under the veil of suspicion [and] was insufficient to justify the stop of the vehicle and therefore does not withstand constitutional scrutiny.”

“In this case, Sergeant Horan, with his years of experience, had a hunch. That, however, is not the standard,” Pierre-Louis added.

Horan’s investigation of the vehicle found dark clothing that matched what the suspects were reported to be wearing, as well as a handgun under the hood of the car. Passengers Peter Nyema and Jamar Myers were originally convicted in the robbery. Both argued to suppress the evidence found in the police stop, but a judge denied their motion.

Although Nyema and Myers later pleaded guilty to first-degree robbery, they challenged the trial court’s decision to deny their motion. The Appellate Division vacated Nyema’s conviction and sentence in his appeal, saying that Horan did not have “reasonable suspicion” to stop the car. However, the appellate panel affirmed the trial court’s denial of the motion to suppress evidence in Myer’s case.

In 2017, Myers — who was sentenced to 30 years without parole for felony murder in another case — was originally sentenced to 12 years in prison for the 7-Eleven robbery, as well as five years for violating probation. Nyema had been sentenced to 15 years for the 7-Eleven robbery.

As a result of the court’s decision Tuesday, the vacation of Nyema’s conviction was upheld, and Myers’s conviction was vacated.

AG’s office weighs in

The state attorney general’s office filed an amicus brief in the case and while it did not take a position, it said that racial profiling of individuals was prohibited under a 2005 directive from the attorney general, which banned what it called “Racially-Influenced Policing.”

The directive was in response to New Jersey police’s long-standing history of racial profiling. The state was at the center of national attention after police shot at four unarmed Black and brown men headed to a basketball tryout during a traffic stop on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1998.

“The Attorney General asserts that consideration of a person’s race or ethnicity — in drawing an inference that an individual may be involved in criminal activity or in exercising police discretion with respect to how the officer will deal with that person — will not be tolerated,” according to court documents for the state Supreme Court decision.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey underscored the attorney general’s directive and filed its own amicus brief, representing 66 Black ministers and clergy members in New Jersey.

“These are the folks who have had to provide spiritual counsel to their congregants, who have been racially profiled, and who have experienced the act of being stopped based on their race,” said attorney Alexander Shalom, who argued the case for the clergy group. “And we did that because we wanted to have conveyed to the court the profound harm that comes from the act of racial profiling.”

Racial profiling can have disproportionate impacts on Black and brown communities. ​​Black people are seven times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than their white counterparts, according to a report by the National Registry of Exonerations. And New Jersey has the worst racial disparities in incarceration rates in the nation.

While the police did guess correctly in this case, Shalom said, that might not always happen. “And when they don’t [guess correctly], that causes really significant harm not just to the people that are stopped, but to their entire communities,” he added.