Tough Challenges Implementing Daniel’s Law
By Albert B. Kelly
If you spend any time at all thinking about legislation, you recognize that no matter how righteous the motivation and no matter how well-crafted the law, there are always unintended consequences. Often the challenge is in implementing a law and working it through down on street level. That seems to be the case with “Daniel’s Law” which was signed into law by Governor Murphy in November.
If you are not familiar with Daniel’s Law, it is named after Daniel Anderl, the 20-year old son of U.S. District Judge Esther Salas who was shot and killed this past summer when Roy Den Hollander, apparently a misogynistic racist who described himself as an anti-feminist lawyer, had a case before Judge Salas and stalked her at her home.
Motivated by hate and enraged toward her because of her Hispanic heritage, he found the judge’s home address, posed as a FedEx driver and rang the doorbell of her home on July 19th hoping to confront Judge Salas. Instead, Den Hollander encountered her son Daniel and then her husband Mark, who was seriously wounded in the attack. Den Hollander was found dead shortly thereafter from a self-inflicted gunshot.
I think every reasonable and decent person agrees with the goals of the legislation, which is to protect those who work in our judicial system and their families. This makes sense since these men and women are on the front lines in terms of dealing with criminals in our society. As I understand the law, it prohibits making public the home addresses (and other information) of current and retired federal, state or municipal officers of the court as well as law enforcement officers, spouses or their children. This includes on the internet and other potentially public sources.
The difficulty comes into play as far as implementation. Officials, especially those at the municipal level, will need some additional help and guidance in terms of how to handle everything advertising tax sales to handling other routine business whether it involves a 200-foot list associated with a zoning board or planning board applications or advertising other records normally released in the name of transparency.
No reasonable person questions the need to protect our judicial officers, but doing so while also balancing transparency and the public’s right to know will not be accomplished easily. I imagine that names and other identifying features could be swapped out for some other generic term whether “John Doe ” or simply “Access Restricted” but as often as these monikers appear, someone intent on finding out will no know they’re getting warm.
Perhaps more challenging for second and third tier municipalities, including their clerks, tax collectors, tax assessors, code offices, and construction offices, will be sifting through records to find out and understand not only who is an officer of the court or a law enforcement officer, but who constitutes and “immediate family member”.
I say that because “immediate family member” is defined in the new law as a spouse, child, or parent of an active, formerly active, or retired judicial officer; prosecutor, law enforcement officer, or any other family member related by blood or by law to the judicial officer, prosecutor, or law enforcement officer who lives in the same residence. Lacking a scarlet letter, knowing and identifying not only the officials themselves, but anyone deemed to be an immediate family member turns into identifying hundreds of people.
This also translates into potentially thousands of records and for a community such as Bridgeton, where a fair number of people covered by this bill like to work their side hustle as landlords, this becomes a monumental task for every department that needs to figure out who is covered and what needs to be redacted.
How is a clerk or tax collector in a given community to know that the new owner of a property, whether landlord or otherwise, is an officer of the court or an immediate family member of someone who is a law enforcement officer? There doesn’t appear to be any system in place for identifying covered persons nor is there a standardized way to reference such persons when something like property records needs to be dealt with.
All jurisdictions want to protect officers of the court, law enforcement officials, as well as immediate family, but there are substantial challenges involved with identifying hundreds of people covered by the law and many thousands of records generated by our modern bureaucracy. We’ll need help.