PRINCETON: Officer, borough $25,000 apart

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
   Princeton Borough and a borough police sergeant are $25,000 apart in their offers to resolve the whistle-blower lawsuit the officer had filed last year.
   Sgt. Kenneth Riley, a 21-year-veteran of the department who had to fight to keep his job, is seeking $100,000 in damages, said B. David Jarashow, one of his lawyers, in a phone interview Monday. The borough put its figure at $75,000. Both sides formally filed those offers in court this year.
   Sgt. Riley, a past officer of the year in the department, has claimed that he was retaliated against after reporting that a fellow sergeant had allowed a suspected drunken driver to urinate in public after a motor vehicle stop in January 2008. As it turned out, the person was allowed to urinate in the bushes of a home owned by the celebrated author Toni Morrison, Mr. Jarashow said.
   The sergeant in that case, now Lt. Robert Currier, was cleared of wrongdoing, while authorities turned their attention to Sgt. Riley. He was indicted in 2008 by a Mercer County grand jury amid allegations that he had improperly accessed a police video database and had showed video of the traffic stop to others within the department to embarrass Sgt. Currier, court papers showed.
   But in the first of a string of legal victories, a judge in November 2009 dismissed all the criminal charges against Sgt. Riley. Despite that, the borough pursued administrative charges against him and terminated him in 2010, his lawyer said.
   The second legal victory occurred last year when a civil court judge threw out the administrative charges and ordered him reinstated with back pay and legal fees to the tune of about $400,000.
   Mr. Jarashow said Sgt. Riley still is working at the department, although he finds himself in an awkward place because he’s with fellow officers who either testified against or investigated him.
   ”It’s difficult under the circumstances,” the lawyer said.
   Borough officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment this week.
   Lawyers for both sides are due back in court at the end of this month. At a hearing scheduled for Dec. 21, Mr. Jarashow plans to ask a judge to find that the borough is legally liable in the whistle-blower suit, a point that a different judge had made when ordering Sgt. Riley reinstated.
   ”The issue of liability does not have to be re-litigated,” Mr. Jarashow said.
   If the sides cannot settle, Mr. Jarashow said his client would seek retroactive pay “based on the fact he had more seniority and education than many of those who were promoted during the time he was out.”
   ”We would argue that he should’ve been a captain by now,” Mr. Jarashow said.