On September 4, 2019, the State of New Jersey agreed to pay $304,419.25 to the estate of an inmate at a Cumberland County state prison who claimed that corrections officers did not monitor him closely enough even though they knew he was a suicide risk.  The lawsuit claimed that one of the officers, the day before the inmate hanged himself from a noose made of a bed sheet, told the inmate, who was begging to see a psychologist, to “Shut up. You might as well kill yourself” because “there was no psych available.” In her suit, Joan Mullin, mother of Robert Mullin, the deceased inmate, claimed th ..read more

On December 2, 2019, the Gloucester County Improvement Authority quietly agreed to pay $55,000 to a kitchen worker at the Authority's Shady Lane Child Development Center who had sued the Authority for sexual harassment and for maintaining a hostile work environment.  The alleged harassment included a supervisor presenting her "with a sexually-suggestive plate of food, featuring a hot dog protruding from the plate sitting between two round mounds of food suggestive of male genitalia." In her lawsuit, Geraldine A. Miller, a food service worker at Shady Lane since October 2017, claimed that she ..read more

On December 19, 2019, Burlington County Assignment Judge Ronald E. Bookbinder approved a $70,000 settlement to resolve a female student's lawsuit against the New Hanover School District (Burlington County).  The girl, who enrolled in the school district as a third-grader in 2013 and is identified in the lawsuit only by her initials M.S., said that "she was forced to leave school and begin homeschooling in June of 2017" due to having endured years of physical assaults and being called "whitey," "white bitch" and "Lesbian" by her fellow students.  According to the suit, other students called her ..read more

On October 14, 2019, the New Lisbon Developmental Center (NLDC), a State-operated facility in Burlington County treating women and men with intellectual and developmental disabilities, agreed to pay $150,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a female Cottage Training Technician who claimed that she was sexually harassed by a male coworker despite his reputation as a sexual harasser. In her lawsuit, Shontrell Coleman, who had worked at NLDC since 2001, said that her problems began when Ralph Kardio, also a Cottage Training Technician, was assigned to Coleman's building in December 2016.  Coleman cl ..read more

On May 6, 2019, the Buena Regional Board of Education (Atlantic County) agreed to pay $185,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a confidential secretary who claimed that the school district's business administrator gave a female employee in whom he had a sexual interest a $10,000 raise to be his secretary.  According to the suit,  the business administrator took the employee to the Tropicana in Atlantic City to have sex with her and also had sex with her in his office during school time.  It was further alleged that both the business administrator and the female employee bragged to the secretary a ..read more