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A Superior Court judge has denied a motion by the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office to compel a criminal defense lawyer to testify before a grand jury against his own client.

Judge Margaret Foti issued a written ruling Thursday on the motion to compel Bloomfield attorney Landry Belizaire to testify about his representation of Roydell Cameron on sexual assault charges. But the judge’s 28-page opinion has not been made public because the prosecutor’s office sought to have it placed under seal. The prosecutor’s office said the opinion should not be made public because it contains grand jury information.

On Friday, Foti ordered prosecutor to identify content in the opinion that it wants to redact, and then other parties in the case will have a chance to review the proposed redactions.

Foti ruled that the prosecutor’s office is not entitled to subpoena Belizaire because it failed to demonstrate the information it seeks is not available elsewhere, according to Raymond Brown Jr. of Scarinci Hollenbeck in Lyndhurst, who represents Belizaire along with colleague Rachel Simon.

“The important point here is a relatively young lawyer, under pressure from the state, stood up and said ‘I will assert my attorney client privilege.’ Thereafter, many in the defense bar rallied to this cause, because this is a critically important issue,” Brown said. “If clients can’t trust their lawyers to keep their conversations in confidence, the system of justice collapses.”

The prosecutor’s office announced in April that it was charging Cameron in connection with a sexual assault that took place in 2005 in Palisades Park. After Cameron retained Belizaire and arranged to surrender to police, he failed to appear at the scheduled time. Cameron was later apprehended at John F. Kennedy Airport, where he had boarded a plane for Jamaica.

The prosecutor’s office served Belizaire with a subpoena duces tecum for documents, including all communications with his client and with any third parties concerning the voluntary surrender. The subpoena also seeks to compel Belizaire to testify against his client before a grand jury. The move by the prosecutor’s office left Belizaire conflicted out of representing Cameron, and he had to withdraw. Cameron is now represented by Hackensack attorney Brian Neary.

The prosecutor’s office has claimed that the crime-fraud exception to attorney-client privilege applies to its subpoena of Belizaire. The assistant prosecutor on the case, Danielle Grootenboer, has stated that she doesn’t think Belizaire was complicit in Cameron’s attempt to flee.

Foti denied the prosecutors’ motion after hearing from two amici curiae, the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers-New Jersey and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, which objected to the attempt to compel Belizaire to testify.

“The state treated this like it was an ordinary witness to the grand jury—that was the thing that was disturbing, not recognizing how central the lawyer-client relationship is,” said Alan Silber of Pashman Stein Walder Hayden in Hackensack, who represented the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers along with colleague Dillon McGuire.

Matthew Adams of Fox Rothschild in Morristown, along with associate Marissa Koblitz Kingman, represents the Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers-New Jersey. Adams said there will be an effort to convince Attorney General Gurbir Grewal that prosecutors must seek special permission from the attorney general before seeking to compel a defense lawyer to testify against a client. Federal prosecutors are already required to seek permission from the U.S. attorney before serving a subpoena on a defense lawyer, Adams said. 

“It’s a matter of such constitutional significance that it ought to be done in the narrowest of circumstances,” Adams said.

Neary, the Hackensack lawyer who took over as counsel to Cameron when Belizaire was conflicted out, was pleased with the judge’s ruling. “Everybody wins when a court protects a person’s sacred right to counsel, especially when faced with the state’s attack on that relationship,” he said. In 1989, Neary represented attorney Joseph Nackson in a case that is considered a seminal authority on attorney-client privilege. In that case, In re Nackson, the court ruled that the attorney properly refused to disclose to a grand jury the whereabouts of a client who consulted him about a fugitive warrant.

Maureen Parenta, spokeswoman for the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office, declined to comment on the ruling.