As COVID-19 infections surged in April, Abbe Dolobowsky said, she was given a hard choice.
The 66-year-old human resources manager from Fair Lawn has asthma and kidney disease, she said. But according to Dolobowsky, her request to work remotely at St. Mary s General Hospital in Passaic was met with an ultimatum: Report to the office, or take an unpaid leave of absence.
She eventually would be granted sick leave. But in early January, Dolobowsky pushed back: She sued for discrimination, saying the hospital had violated state law.
She s not the only one going to court over workplace conditions during the pandemic: This month, a factory worker for Sealy Mattress Co. in Paterson alleged he was fired in retaliation for filing a grievance over allegedly lax face mask rules.
With New Jersey courts enduring indefinite delays to hold jury trials, the state’s top court is considering temporarily releasing up to 1,100 county jail inmates awaiting trial, despite prosecutors protests that the move would be dangerous and illegal.
In a virtual hearing Wednesday, the state Supreme Court heard arguments to free all but the most serious offenders whose cases have wallowed for longer than six months due to the pandemic. Out of fairness to the accused, attorneys for the state Office of the Public Defender and the American Civil Liberties Union asked that the high court to develop new criteria to re-weigh the risks the inmates pose to society in order to release as many as possible.
NorthJersey.com
Litigants are lining up against a Bergen County-based diagnostic lab company for allegedly selling fraudulent COVID-19 tests at one of its South Jersey locations, a scheme officials say ended only after an FBI raid of the facility in early December.
At least four people who fell for the alleged fraud have joined a class-action lawsuit against Infinity Diagnostics Labs, accusing the Teterboro company of advertising $75 rapid COVID tests that were actually antibody tests with no capacity to detect the virus.
The kits were distributed out of an Infinity location in Ventnor City, according to the suit, filed Dec. 15 in state Superior Court in Atlantic County. The storefront has since shuttered, but not before the alleged scam hoodwinked potentially thousands of people, according to the complaint.
NorthJersey.com
Khalil Wheeler-Weaver displayed an unnerving lack of emotion when he exited an Essex County courtroom last December in handcuffs.
Three years earlier, the Orange man killed his first victim at the start of a frenzied 88-day killing spree across North Jersey that ended only after the friends and family of one Montclair victim conceived a fake online profile to lure him to police.
A two-month trial in the fall of 2019 presented more than 40 witnesses, Wheeler-Weaver s incriminating Google searches on how to make homemade poison and a videotaped police interview where he was caught in lie after lie about his exploits. Two hours was all a jury needed on Dec. 19, 2019 to convict him of killing three women and attempting to murder a fourth who narrowly escaped the same fate.