by Dana DiFilippo, New Jersey Monitor
Two Camden men spent 25 years in prison for a double murder they didn’t commit.
A young Plainfield mother who went to a New Brunswick hospital to give birth was left partially paralyzed after doctors botched the epidural.
Police wrongly dispatched to a Bridgeton home startled the elderly couple sleeping inside — and then shot the man, arrested the woman, and failed to realize their errors for hours.
The three incidents prompted lawsuits that cost New Jersey taxpayers almost $17 million to settle in 2023. But that was just a fraction of the $121.5 million the state paid out last year to resolve 364 complaints against the state, state agencies, and state workers, according to records the New Jersey Monitor got Thursday through a records request filed in early January.
Advocates say the payouts hold lessons for state policymakers who must ensure taxpayer money is spent responsibly.
“Lawsuits are going to happen. There are going to be accidents, there is going to be negligence, these are just part of human behavior,” said Peter Chen, senior policy analyst with New Jersey Policy Perspective. “But there are certainly things that states can do to reduce the extent to which these kinds of errors occur.”
That includes spending enough to properly train state workers and arm them with the resources they need to do their jobs, which can help reduce the risk of law enforcement officers trampling citizens’ constitutional rights or NJ Transit failing to maintain its vehicles and property, he said.
“The very basic kinds of boring maintenance of government that people are grumpy about funding — and often make a lot of hay about having to fund — are actually really important and can help mitigate risk,” Chen said.
Most of last year’s lawsuit judgments and settlements arose out of public transit accidents, workplace safety issues, and police misconduct that left people dead or seriously, permanently hurt, the records show. More than 110 payouts involved NJ Transit, while at least 25 involved police or prisons.
Twenty-three lawsuits resulted in payouts of over $1 million, while the largest — for $19.3 million — went to Medicaid for “disallowance matters,” which means the state paid claims through Medicaid that weren’t allowed.
Altogether, lawsuits cost the state less last year than in 2022 or 2021, when payouts totaled $177 million and $196 million, respectively.
In 2023, the state paid:
In 2023, the state paid:
- $700,000 to Gerald and Margot Sykes of Bridgeton. The elderly couple panicked when they awoke to find men peering in their bedroom windows in 2016, thinking they were burglars, according to a lawsuit they later filed. Gerald Sykes, then 76, got his guns and confronted the men — who turned out to be state troopers, sent to the home in error, the suit says. The troopers shot him three times, handcuffed him as he bled on the ground with broken ribs and a collapsed lung, and arrested and interrogated his 80-year-old wife, before realizing their mistake several hours later, the couple said in their complaint.
- $1.25 million each to Kevin Baker and Sean Washington of Camden, who were wrongly convicted and imprisoned for 25 years for a 1995 double murder.
- $175,000 to a 16-year-old boy who suffered a broken wrist in 2020 when a correctional officer beat him while he was handcuffed at a Bordentown juvenile lockup.
- A total of $1.5 million to two drivers after state troopers hit their cars in separate crashes.
- Almost $1.8 million to the family of Siham Hajbi, a pedestrian who died in June 2021 after a NJ Transit bus turned a corner and hit her in a Haledon crosswalk. Several bus passengers injured in NJ Transit crashes and a limo driver hit by a NJ Transit bus in the Lincoln Tunnel also got six-figure payouts, and a Brooklyn woman got about $500,000 after she sued NJ Transit for failing to eject the unruly bus passenger who threw a glass object at her face in 2014.
- $2.5 million to Kevin Powers, a NJ Transit brakeman who fell on garbage in a Bergen County rail yard in 2015 and needed surgeries for a wrist injury, his lawsuit said. Gabriel Santanna, a NJ Transit trackman, got almost $1.5 million after he sued because he got hurt in 2017 by malfunctioning equipment. Another worker, Omash Raghunandan, took a $660,000 payout after he was hurt in 2018 tripping over a barbell left on the floor of a NJ Transit material shop in Hoboken. Several rail workers also collected six-figure payouts for toxic exposure to carcinogens at their workplaces.
Some of the biggest payouts resulted from deficient medical care at the state’s public and teaching hospitals, University Hospital in Newark, Robert Wood Johnson University Medical Center in New Brunswick, and Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
The state paid $13.5 million to Alexandra Mejia of Plainfield, who went to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital to give birth in 2019 — but was left partially paralyzed after complications arose from an epidural. She was 18 at the time.
A Newark mother and her son, whose leg was amputated after a surgery went wrong at Newark Beth Israel in 2019, settled their lawsuit for $4.5 million.
Akintola Hanif Martin received $2.5 million after he suffered a stroke in 2017 but went without proper treatment for hours because emergency responders and University Hospital doctors thought he’d overdosed on drugs, according to his lawsuit. That was a wrong assumption Martin, who’s Black, blamed on racism. The delayed diagnosis and treatment left him with brain damage, partial paralysis, and more injuries, according to the suit.
And the family of Ryan Andrews Newton got $2 million after he died at 25 in 2015 because doctors affiliated with Rutgers and Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital failed to diagnose and properly treat his malaria and sepsis, their lawsuit charged.
Tax disputes also led to large payouts, records show.
A woman who had interests in several French vineyards and wineries accepted $1.1 million to end her lawsuit over taxes on foreign income. Jersey Central Power & Light took $7.7 million to resolve its complaint over tax overpayments. And a Delaware-based investment banking firm that claimed it overpaid corporate business tax in New Jersey got $2.9 million.
A whistleblower who won a $7.5 million jury award in 2015 against the state Department of Corrections collected a $1.5 million payout last year after the state successfully appealed the award in 2019. In her lawsuit, Lisa Easley claimed she was fired from her job at a youth correctional facility in Chesterfield in 2012 after helping to expose a bribery scheme in the department.
Some people involved in wrecks on state highways also successfully sued and pocketed big payouts over faulty road conditions they blamed for their crashes.
And the mother of a Kean University student who died at school in 2019 was paid $250,000 to end her wrongful death lawsuit. Senior Kevin Gomez curled up under his desk during class, but no one checked on him, noticed that he’d vomited and was bleeding from the nose and mouth, or called paramedics for over an hour, and he died at the hospital soon after arrival, according to that lawsuit.
Recoveries
The state recovered money through lawsuits last year, too, adding $596 million back to state coffers, records show.
Lawsuits and investigations brought in almost 37% more money than they did in 2022, with almost $460 million of that coming from pharmacy chains, drug makers, and drug distributors as required under nationwide opioid settlements.
Other big recoveries stemmed from taxation disputes, debt recovery, and consumer protection actions.
The e-cigarette manufacturer Juul Labs paid $33.6 million over its marketing and sales practices, while Dollar General surrendered $1.2 million to resolve pricing complaints. Morgan Stanley paid the state $1.2 million after a multistate investigation into data security problems, and software company Blackbaud forked over $1 million for its inadequate response to a 2020 ransomware incident.
Newark-based MJ & Sons paid New Jersey $8 million over a statewide illegal dumping scheme.
“I am proud that, thanks to the work of our dedicated attorneys, we have delivered hundreds of millions of dollars back in to our residents’ pockets and made them safer in the process,” New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin said in a statement.