Landmark jurisprudence: New Jersey's Attorney General goes after New Jersey negotiations.
Extortion is a crime of force, threats, violence, and coercion through unlawful means. It is not a crime of hard bargaining, aggressive business practices, or foul language. This is an obvious, intuitive legal line – and one the prosecutors pursuing George Norcross seek to obliterate.
The “smoking gun” evidence involves no guns; it is that Norcross told his counterparty there would be “consequences” if that counterparty squelched on their deal, and that Norcross said, Perhaps unsurprisingly, the law does not support imposing Sunday school rules on all business transactions in the Garden State. Courts have uniformly held that the laws at issue – fundamentally based on extortion – do not extend to “hard bargaining” within an arms-length business transaction. Indeed, the official commentary on New Jersey’s criminal code specifically carves out “threats” like those here from the state’s extortion laws.
Bringing such serious charges on such flimsy bases is dangerous. If the state’s primary theory succeeds, it would cast a pall of prosecution over everyday business dealings across New Jersey. It would put prosecutors in the place of deciding when hardball negotiations become criminal offenses, empowering the Attorney General to set civility codes for doing business – with jail awaiting any businessman who is too mean.
@Nlopinion George-Norcross Matt-Platkin Nj-Attorney-General Crime
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