In fact, Whitman had sedulously ignored the problem for most of her term, insisting that racial profiling was not a practice of the state police. Even after two New Jersey state troopers fired eleven shots into a van carrying four black men on their way to a basketball clinic in 1998, Whitman clung to her contention that the action was not racially motivated. In 1995, a New Jersey state judge threw out charges against fifteen black drivers who, the judge concluded, had been pulled over without cause. During the trial it emerged that on a 26-mile long stretch on the southern part of the New Jersey Turnpike minorities accounted for 46 percent of the drivers stopped, even though they accounted for only 15 percent of suspected speeders.