Lawsuit - SIG vs. N.J. State Police

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Gunmaker SIG Sauer is in hot water after the state of New Jersey sued the company for breach of contract when they allegedly delivered defective handguns to their State Police. In mid-2014, SIG Sauer won a contract to provide pistols to the New Jersey State Police and reportedly subsequently delivered 3,000 SIG P229 handguns. However, according to the NJSP, the pistols proved irreparably defective.

Although the P229 performed well in testing, the handguns actually delivered to the NJSP that year were plagued by failures to eject, according to the official complaint filed with the Superior Court of New Jersey. SIG Sauer diagnosed the malfuntions as being caused by the pistol’s extractor pins, which were subsequently replaced; however, this did not remedy the problem. As a result, SIG representatives visited the NJSP and supplied 250 new extractor springs to fix the problem, but the problems still persisted.

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By the end of October 2015, the document states, the NJSP began to identify the issue as being related to differences between the weapons trialed during the procurement process and those that were actually delivered. According to the document, while it was the SIG P229 Legacy that was trialed and that won the competition, the weapons that were delivered were of the very similar but distinct P229 Enhanced Elite model. Notably, the Enhanced Elite is alleged to differ from the Legacy in its extractor system, leading to reasonable speculation that this substitution was the cause of the malfunctions.

SIG Sauer agreed to replace the P229 Enhanced Elites with P229 Legacy models, but then allegedly failed to meet the deadline of January 2016 for the delivery of 750 of these weapons, having only delivered by that point 364 pistols. At this point, the document states that SIG Sauer informed the NJSP that it would only be able to deliver half of the 1,000 pistols it promised by the end of January 2016.

During a January 12, 2016 training course, the replacement SIG P229 Legacy handguns also exhibited failures to eject with both practice and duty ammunition. Consequently, SIG Sauer representatives and the NJSP met to inspect the most recent shipment of P229 Legacy handguns. During this inspection, SIG Sauer representatives “red lined” five of the 25 handguns randomly selected from the shipment, for exhibiting unacceptable manufacturing defects. Subsequent testing in the presence of SIG Sauer representatives produced more failures to eject, which continued even after the weapons were serviced by SIG gunsmiths.

After this incident, the NJSP decided to cease further discussion with SIG Sauer, and instead procure a new handgun, which resulted in procurement of the Glock 19 Gen 4.

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