Case closed, open records
Over the seven months since New Jersey political insider John Sheridan and his wife, Joyce, were found mortally wounded amid a deliberately set fire in their central New Jersey home, the official opacity surrounding their deaths has been steadily stripped of every defensible rationale. Now that the conclusion of the criminal investigation is more than a month old, it's clear that the persistent secrecy serves only to cover up incompetence or worse.
Over the seven months since New Jersey political insider John Sheridan and his wife, Joyce, were found mortally wounded amid a deliberately set fire in their central New Jersey home, the official opacity surrounding their deaths has been steadily stripped of every defensible rationale. Now that the conclusion of the criminal investigation is more than a month old, it's clear that the persistent secrecy serves only to cover up incompetence or worse.
According to law and logic, continuing investigations are among the most compelling justifications for government discretion. Law enforcement officials trying to solve crimes and arrest criminals have good reason to keep certain information close, and New Jersey law allows them to do so to protect active investigations.
The Sheridan investigation no longer fits that description. Somerset County Prosecutor Geoffrey Soriano left much unclear when he broke his six-month silence to assert that John Sheridan, the CEO of Cooper Health System and a onetime cabinet member, had killed his wife and then himself. But he left no doubt that his investigation was over.
And yet his stonewalling isn't. Despite the closure of the case and the will of the Sheridan family, officials continue to suppress information about the couple's deaths.
Mark Sheridan, their eldest son and a prominent Republican attorney, has argued persuasively that authorities leaped to the conclusion that the crime was a murder-suicide, ignored evidence contradicting their hypothesis, and withheld information to conceal the investigation's shortcomings. In a letter to acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman last week requesting investigative records that authorities have yet to release, Sheridan wrote, "The Somerset County Prosecutor's Office imposed its desired result with little to no evidence supporting its murder-suicide conclusion. Now it seeks to hide the facts of its inadequate investigation from our family." Last month, in a letter to Soriano challenging his conclusions in remarkable detail, Sheridan raised a host of questions about a missing weapon, autopsy discrepancies, misconstrued evidence, tensions between agencies, and other investigative weaknesses. "Throughout," Sheridan wrote, "your office withheld the facts regarding its failures from the public."
Indeed, Soriano's office withheld facts as fundamental as the crimes committed and the weapons involved - information that state law expressly requires authorities to disclose immediately. As a result, New Jerseyans were not informed that two people had been stabbed to death in their midst for months.
Sadly, this pattern hasn't changed. Asked about the Sheridan family's latest demand for information, a spokesman for the Attorney General's Office, which oversees county prosecutors, told The Inquirer that it was "between the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office and the Sheridan family." The Prosecutor's Office, meanwhile, argued that "the questions posed are within the primary purview of the Attorney General's Office."
The attorney general should accept this latest invitation to subject a wayward office to much-needed oversight. He can begin to correct a long-standing affront to responsible law enforcement and open government by releasing all the relevant records to the Sheridan family and the public.