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The lawyer for the A-Team challengers whose suit was dismissed to count disqualified vote by mail [VBM] ballots from last year’s municipal election said the presence of a detective from the Monmouth County Prosecutors Office during the trial intimidated witnesses they needed from appearing.

As a result, Monmouth County Superior Court Judge Dennis O’Brien “terminated the proceedings,” said A-Team attorney Aaron Mizrahi in an e-mail to the Sun. He called the presence of the detective “intimidating and apparently staged.”

On Thursday, O’Brien dismissed the lawsuit by A-team candidates Remond Palmer and Michele Council [shown above]  to count the ballots and potentially force a mayoral run-off between Mayor John Moor and Palmer, as well as to give enough votes to Council for her to win a board of education seat.

Moor, who represented  himself in the lawsuit, said the Judge dismissed the case after the A-Team candidates could only produce one voter to testify. The Judge had directed Palmer and Council to produce 77 voters to testify about their disqualified ballots.

But Mizrahi charged that witnesses were unwilling to come forward because of the presence in the courtroom of a detective from the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office during the trial. Those witnesses, he said, were “unsettled by the intimidating and apparently staged presence of a Monmouth County Prosecutor’s detective in the courtroom.”

“As a result, after identifying a number of ambiguities in the law, Judge O’Brien moved to terminate the proceedings so the Appellate Division may rule on legal issues that could discredit Mr. Moor’s election as Mayor, as well as confirm Petitioners’ evidence of inequitable practices by the Board of Elections and its tacit endorsement of the Asbury Together campaign’s suppression scheme,” Mizrahi said.

Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Charles Webster said it is common practice for a detective so sit in on such proceedings in order to garner information for an investigation.

“The fact of the matter is that any court room is an open forum unless the Judge closes proceedings for a verifiable reason,” Webster said. “The court house is a place where there are law enforcement officers everywhere. This is an important case and in the matter of an investigation a detective will sit inside a courtroom.”

Webster said no intimidation complaints have been filed.

“There has not been any complaint filed with this office in this scenario,” Webster said. “We have a responsibility to investigate every instance of wrong doing but no one, not Mr. Mizrahi or anyone else, has come forward to report there was some sort of intimidation going on by one of our detectives.”

The full statement from Mizrahi is below:

While the Court recognized that additional witness testimony in this phase of the case would be compelling, already-disenfranchised voters became more unsettled by the intimidating and apparently staged presence of a Monmouth County Prosecutor’s detective in the courtroom.  As a result, after identifying a number of ambiguities in the law, Judge O’Brien moved to terminate the proceedings so the Appellate Division may rule on legal issues that could discredit Mr. Moor’s election as Mayor, as well as confirm Petitioners’ evidence of inequitable practices by the Board of Elections and its tacit endorsement of the Asbury Together campaign’s suppression scheme.  We expect to release a full statement on March 13, 2015 containing a comprehensive outline of the issues and their implications moving forward.

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