“There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.” —Elie Wiesel

Yesterday, the New York Times ran the first article in a series highlighting the issue of witness intimidation in New Jersey. Though the problem is certainly not exclusive to the Garden State, it is compounded there by the reluctance of some prosecutors to pursue justice in cases that are less than a “slam-dunk.” As a result, killers walk free, and victims’ families grieve without closure. Today, I protest this injustice:

With Witnesses at Risk, Murder Suspects Go Free

NEWARK, Feb. 27 — When Yusef Johnson, a 15-year-old honors student, was killed outside an apartment complex here so gang-infested it is known as Crazyville, a witness came forward within days and told the police she knew the man she had seen fire the fatal shots.

In another case three months later, in November 2005, officers found two people who identified a street gang leader as the man they saw kill a marijuana dealer named Valterez Coley during a dispute over a woman.

And when Isaiah Stewart, a 17-year-old wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet from a recent brush with the law, was gunned down that December, another Newark teenager sketched a diagram of the crime scene, correctly identified the murder weapon and named a former classmate as the person he had watched commit the crime.

They seem like slam-dunk cases, but none of the three suspects have been arrested. It is not that detectives are unsure of their identity or cannot find them. Rather, it is because so many recent cases here have been scuttled when witnesses were scared silent that the Essex County prosecutor has established an unwritten rule discouraging pursuit of cases that rely on a single witness, and those in which witness statements are not extensively corroborated by forensic evidence.

The 3 are among at least 14 recent murders in Newark in which witnesses have clearly identified the killers but no charges have been filed, infuriating local police commanders and victims’ relatives.

In 8 of the 14 cases, according to court documents and police reports, there was more than one witness; in two of them, off-duty police officers were among those identifying the suspects. But in a DNA era, these are cases with little or no physical evidence, and they often involve witnesses whose credibility could be compromised by criminal history or drug problems, or both. [full text]