New Jersey
governor Jon Corzine has nominated a judge for the state's
municipal court that activists have pointed out has an
antigay record. Steven J. Zaben, nominated officially
in February, has said that of the 200 public
lewdness cases he's heard regarding Palisades
Interstate Park, more than half involved gay men. According
to Gay City News, these cases resulted in guilty
pleas by the defendants and harsh sentencing by the judge,
including $1,000 fines, two years on probation, a
two-year ban from the park and the highway that runs
through it, or psychiatric counseling.
Gay and civil
liberties activists say that Zaben gives lighter sentences
to heterosexuals, but he told the News that
he's "not biased. In all the cases that I hear I don't take
a position as to race, gender, or sexual orientation."
Men arrested in
the park said they exposed themselves only after being
urged to do so by an undercover police officer.
In a 2005 case,
Zaben concluded that because the defendant was gay, he
was in the park to have a sexual encounter. The defendant
said he was in the park for lunch when a plainclothes
officer said to him, "Show me what you got... Take it
out, show me what you got."
The conviction
was overturned in 2006 by an appeals court, which
questioned the detective's account and Zaben's logic.
Corzine has
nominated Zaben to preside over the state's worker's
compensation court.
"This nomination
is akin to nominating Pee-wee Herman for the Nobel
Prize in economics; it's patently obscene," Steven
Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, told the
newspaper. "Judge Zaben is not even fit to preside
over The People's Court." (The Advocate)