A county detective charged with official misconduct in connection with the investigation of a hit-and-run accident involving his mother-in-law will be going to trial next year.
Robert P. Harkins Jr., a detective sergeant in the Cape May County Prosecutor’s Office, has rejected a plea deal with the state Attorney General’s Office, electing instead to have the case heard by a jury. At a hearing Friday, Oct. 20, the case was listed for trial beginning March 4.
The state had recently upped its plea offer to a three-year flat state prison term, with a consent order to forfeit his job, after the defense went forward with arguing a motion to dismiss the state’s indictment. A judge denied that motion in September. The state had previously been offering probation with forfeiture of his job in exchange for a guilty plea to the least serious count Harkins is facing.
The Attorney General’s Office alleges that Harkins launched an unauthorized investigation into a hit-and-run fender bender in which Harkins’ mother-in-law was the victim in 2019. He is charged with second-degree official misconduct, third-degree tampering with records and fourth-degree falsifying records.
According to the state, Harkins made up a phony case number that he used in requests for non-public information from state law enforcement agencies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He also allegedly improperly issued a subpoena to the drugstore outside of which the hit-and-run accident occurred and then used the surveillance footage provided in response to the subpoena to identify a suspect. Subsequently, the state says, Harkins surveilled the suspect driver’s house at night.
Harkins allegedly didn’t document these activities on an internal system used by the Prosecutor’s Office, instead using outdated forms, allegedly to avoid detection from his superiors. Eventually he provided the Middle Township Police Department – the law enforcement agency that initially responded to the incident – with his findings. That department turned the report over to Harkins’ superiors, subsequently prompting the state to bring charges.
In a pretrial memorandum dated Oct. 20, the defense indicates it plans to raise unique evidential issues, including the admissibility of workplace harassment allegations and accusations of retaliation for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) complaints of other employees.
Louis M. Barbone, Harkins’ defense lawyer, told the Herald his client is being “selectively targeted for criminal prosecution,” adding the defense “will present witnesses to prove it at the time of trial.”
Harkins’ defense alleges the prosecution is related to his client’s support for Lakeisha Davis and Kathryn Gannon. The two women are suing the prosecutor’s office for discrimination in Camden federal court.
“My client was a supervisor in the prosecutor’s office who took seriously his duty to uphold the law and outwardly support co-employees that suffered discrimination because of their race and gender,” Barbone wrote in a letter to the Herald.
Harkins was Davis’ direct supervisor at the Prosecutor’s Office and will likely be called as a witness for the plaintiffs in that federal civil case, according to Michelle Douglass, an attorney representing the two women.
“[Prosecutors] have a lot of discretion,” Douglass said earlier this year. “They can choose what to enforce, how to enforce it and how tough they want to be in terms of enforcing it. I think they could have handled it much better but for the fact that [Harkins] was viewed as not being one of the loyalists to the chief detective.”
Harkins will return to court for a calendar management conference Friday, Feb. 16, where pretrial motions will be discussed, likely including the admissibility of evidence at trial related to Gannon and Davis’ complaints and Harkins’ role in them.
Responding to a prior inquiry from the Herald regarding the connection between the civil case brought by Gannon and Davis, an Attorney General’s Office spokesperson said, “The state’s criminal prosecution is guided only by the applicable law and facts.”
A conviction on the official misconduct charge carries a five-year mandatory minimum sentence, with five years of parole ineligibility. If convicted on all three counts, Harkins faces over 16 years in state prison, with seven years of parole ineligibility, if he is sentenced to consecutive terms.
In the brief hearing in Cape May County Superior Court Oct. 20, Harkins told Presiding Judge Bernard E. DeLury Jr. he understood his exposure and wished to proceed to trial.
Contact the author, Shay Roddy, at sroddy@cmcherald.com or 609-886-8600, ext. 142.
