OFFENSIVE LITIGANT BACK AGAIN

Why not? He scored $230,000 last time

A homeless man who sued and received $230,000 after a library in Morris County ejected him is suing NJ Transit for kicking him and other homeless people out of train stations since August. Richard Kreimer's civil rights lawsuit, filed yesterday in U.S. District Court in Newark, seeks at least $5 million in damages against NJ Transit, the City of Summit, nine police officers, and several other defendants. He also wants a judge to decide whether transit stations are public or private property and whether people who are not ticketed passengers have the right to be in them. "As soon as you walk into a train station and you look like a bum, the cops come right over to you," said Kreimer, 55, who is acting as his own lawyer. "It's like flies onto fly paper. This is a classic First Amendment question: Does a citizen have the right to be in a public place when they're not traveling, or not?"

NJ Transit spokeswoman Penny Bassett-Hackett and Barry Osmun, Summit's attorney, said they had not seen the lawsuit and declined to comment on it. For several months, the American Civil Liberties Union and NJ Transit have been negotiating rules changes that would allow homeless people to use the train system and retain NJ Transit's right to insist on acceptable behavior. Bassett-Hackett said Kreimer's lawsuit would "absolutely not" affect those talks.

Kreimer said police told him that he had to leave a bench outside the Summit train station in August because he was loitering. He said the experience had been repeated inside stations in Newark, Trenton, Hoboken and elsewhere. In December, Kreimer said, a conductor on the Bergen Line threw away his ticket and told him that he could not ride the train back and forth because he was homeless. "It makes me feel humiliated, and it also makes me appreciate the times I had a place to live," said Kreimer, bundled under two grimy coats and several additional layers of clothing and clutching a black duffel bag containing the 18 types of medication he said he had to take. "They think they can go unchallenged because some don't think people like me are worthy of protection."

Kreimer drew national attention in 1991 after suing Morristown, the Morris Township public library, and the Police Department after the library threw him out at least five times, claiming his body odor and the way he looked at patrons offended them.

Morristown paid $150,000 to settle a harassment suit, and the library's insurer kicked in $80,000 to get Kreimer to drop his suit after a federal judge ruled the library's rules on hygiene were unconstitutional. That ruling was overturned, but not before Kreimer had been paid.

Kreimer gets about $700 a month in Social Security disability payments, but he said that was not enough to afford a place to live, adding that he was too sick to work.

From here


(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)