In Trenton, child welfare workers left 5-year-old Diamond Smith in an abusive home, and her father beat her to death. In New Brunswick, a doctor who operated on an infant to remove a diseased kidney accidentally removed her healthy kidney too, leaving the child in need of medical care for life. And in foster homes and youth jails around the state, babies and children endured horrific sexual abuse.
The state paid more than $70 million last year to resolve lawsuits stemming from crimes and offenses against these children and more, according to data the New Jersey Monitor obtained this week through public records requests.
The payouts accounted for over a third of the $189.2 million officials forked out to end 373 legal cases in 2025, the data shows. Aside from the lawsuits filed on behalf of children, the costliest cases arose from medical malpractice accusations against the state’s public hospitals, injuries and deaths on public transit and highways, civil rights violations suffered at the hands of police, and one big environmental cleanup.
Thirty-seven cases resulted in payouts of $1 million or more, with the highest — nearly $25.7 million — resolving a lawsuit NL Industries, a Dallas-based lead-smelting company, filed to compel the state to share the cost of cleaning up contaminants from the Raritan Bay Slag Superfund site in Old Bridge.
The smallest payout was $119.25 for a tax dispute. Ten lawsuits settled for $1,000 or less.
Lawsuit payouts can be a pricey wild card for government, making it tough for public officials to budget for, said Peter Chen, a senior policy analyst for New Jersey Policy Perspective, a progressive think tank.
They also don’t reliably expose current problems ripe for fixing, because they tend to resolve legal claims from wrongs that can be years, or even decades, old, Chen added. The sex abuse settlements involve two siblings who each got a $9.8 million payout for foster care abuse that began in 1969 and three other people placed in foster homes between 1979 and 1996 who got a combined $13 million.
Still, Chen said, state officials should be more transparent about why people sue the state and how much the cases cost, because such public reporting helps taxpayers learn how their money is spent, identify problematic trends, and push for remedies. He suggested posting such information on Gov. Mikie Sherrill’s budget transparency portal or the attorney general’s criminal justice dashboards.
“From a good government standpoint, more of these settlements and what they contain should be made public, in a more transparent manner, especially because this is for wrongdoing of the state or the state’s agents — and so therefore oversight is important and should lead to questions,” Chen said.
Both the number and cost of lawsuits that resulted in settlements or judgments against the state last year were higher than in 2024, when the state had to pay almost $178 million in 332 cases, and in 2023, when the state paid $121.5 million in 364 cases.
The Superfund settlement
In 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ordered NL Industries to do a $79 million cleanup of a 1.5-mile stretch of the Raritan Bay waterfront the feds said the company contaminated by dumping slag into the Raritan River from its nearby Perth Amboy plant. Slag is the waste left behind from smelting.
But the company sued the state in 2017, embracing the “polluter must pay” mantra popular among environmentalists and blaming government as the site’s original polluter.
In its lawsuit, the company accused the state, township, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers of allowing and encouraging private developers to use slag to build a seawall and refurbish a jetty along the Laurence Harbor shoreline in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Those entities were “public polluters” that should shoulder some of the site’s cleanup costs, the company charged.
The EPA apparently agreed and proposed a settlement in 2024 that also put the state and other public entities on the hook for remediation costs that had ballooned to over $150 million. A federal judge issued a consent decree in February 2025.
Greg Remaud, the New York/New Jersey Baykeeper, has been fighting for the site’s cleanup for years. His group also sued NL Industries over separate contamination related to the company’s pigment manufacturing.
He called the state’s $25.7 million cost for cleanup fair.
“They signed off on allowing lead slag to be used in seawalls and places right next to the water and in a public area. They made a big mistake, and so yeah, the state certainly should have contributed to the solution,” Remaud said.
Protecting kids
State lawmakers in 2019 expanded the statute of limitations for sex crimes to give victims a longer timeline to file civil lawsuits. That resulted in a spike in lawsuits against the state for abuse children suffered long ago by teachers, youth detention guards, counselors, and other staff.
About 350 cases are still winding their way through the courts, with payouts likely to cost the state at least $350 million altogether. Last year, nine lawsuits involving sex abuse of children in the state’s custody cost the state at least $1 million each to resolve.
Medical mistakes that left children grievously injured or dead also proved costly to the state last year.
A Metuchen couple sued a pediatric urologist at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick after he recommended surgery to remove their newborn daughter’s non-functioning right kidney — but then removed her healthy left kidney too during a 2018 surgery, according to their lawsuit. The state paid $10 million to resolve that claim.
A baby’s death during surgery by another Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital physician cost the state $1.5 million. In that case, a Carteret mother sued a pediatric anesthesiologist after multiple failed attempts to anesthetize her 3-month-old twin son for hernia surgery resulted in his death in 2022, according to her lawsuit.
The family of a Belleville boy also sued the hospital and anesthesiologists there, accusing them of errors during the child’s 2021 orthopedic surgery that left him profoundly disabled. That case ended in a $5.5 million payout.
And relatives of a newborn whose mother, Haidy Roberts, died of sepsis the day after she was born in May 2020 sued Robert Wood Johnson doctors, accusing them of failing to properly diagnose and treat the first-time mother. That lawsuit ended in a $4 million payout.
The state forked out another $3.2 million to settle a lawsuit over its failure to prevent Masceo Emanuel from beating his 5-year-old daughter Diamond Smith to death with a brush and belt in 2012.
Child welfare workers had previously investigated the family, provided Diamond’s mother with parenting and life skills training, and reopened their investigation after a neighbor told Emanuel’s probation officer that he heard the child being beaten badly, according to a 2015 complaint. The parents denied any abuse, social workers closed the investigation, and three months later, Diamond was dead, with extensive bruising, burn marks, a distended belly from malnourishment, and multiple old scars on her arms and legs, the lawsuit says.
And an 11-year-old boy who survived a 2019 car crash that killed his parents and older sister got $750,000 to settle his wrongful death claim. The Cardoso-Baez family’s car collided with a tanker truck at a Gloucester County intersection the lawsuit described as confusing and dangerous.
Law enforcement misconduct
Police brutality, mistreatment in jails and prisons, and false arrest and malicious prosecution claims put the state on the hook for more than $6 million last year.
The highest payout, $1.3 million, went to the family of Jimmy Lee Testa of Cumberland County.
Testa died during a 2016 encounter with state troopers at a vacant home in Leesburg, where Testa was hunting scrap metal to sell and the troopers had responded to a burglary call. The officers were accused of beating, pepper-spraying, and shooting Testa in the back as they tried to arrest him. The family filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2018 accusing the officers of using excessive force.
Two men who beat felony cases collected more than $2 million, combined.
Newark police arrested Corey Fallen of Atlanta for the 2011 murder of a go-go dancer, but Fallen had never been to New Jersey and had an alibi for the night of the murder, according to a civil rights complaint he filed in 2015. He spent six months in jail and missed the birth of his baby before a grand jury declined to indict him, according to the lawsuit. The state paid $1.25 million to resolve that case.
Isai Torres was arrested in 2013 for a carjacking in Irvington and subsequent carjackings in Newark. He spent almost nine months in jail before prosecutors dropped the charges. His 2017 civil rights lawsuit ended last year with a $900,000 payout.
Transportation troubles
Public transit always drives a lot of lawsuits.
Cases that settled last year involved a driver injured when a chunk of bridge fell onto his passing car ($2.75 million), a road worker hit by a drunk driver in a construction zone ($2.75 million), a motorist hit by a train at a crossing with malfunctioning lights ($1.76 million), a train passenger who fell down steps ($1.7 million), a conductor hurt when the bench he was sitting on collapsed ($1.5 million), a Jersey City firefighter hurt when his fire truck got hit by a light-rail train on his way to a call ($1.4 million), and multiple motorists and pedestrians hit by NJ Transit buses.
The family of a Newark man who died after a NJ Transit bus driver closed the door on his arm, dragged him, and then ran over him sued and collected $1.7 million in payouts to resolve their wrongful death lawsuit. That driver, who police said ignored Kevin Thomas’ screams during the incident on New Year’s Eve of 2019, was criminally charged.
Recoveries
As much as the state paid out to settle lawsuits, it brought in more for legal claims it pursued for consumer fraud, environmental contamination, financial scams, Medicaid fraud, and more.
Civil enforcement efforts brought $193 million into state coffers last year.
That’s lower than the $430 million the state recovered in 2024 and nearly $600 million in 2023.
Just 10 of nearly 800 recoveries topped $1 million. The smallest was $10.44.
The biggest recovery last year was $100 million Horizon Healthcare Services Inc. agreed in November to pay New Jersey to settle claims it fraudulently induced the state into a 2020 contract to operate the healthcare plan for public workers and then systematically overcharged the state for claims. The agreement is the largest-ever settlement (that’s unrelated to Medicaid) under the state’s False Claims Act.
The state also brought in nearly $34 million from Solvay Specialty Polymers USA over its discharge of polyfluoroalkyl substances, carcinogenic contaminants also known as “forever chemicals,” into the environment from the Gloucester County facility where it manufactures chemicals.
And in September, the ride-sharing company Lyft paid the state $19.4 million for various labor violations between 2014 and 2017.
