BENNINGTON — After failing to call into a court hearing last week, the 78-year-old defendant in a decades-old sex assault case phoned into a pre-trial conference Thursday — but only after a last-minute request to be excused.
Leonard Forte, a former New York detective, was convicted in 1988 of repeatedly raping his daughter’s 12-year-old friend the year before during a trip to the Bennington County town of Landgrove and again back home in Long Island.
The Vermont Superior Court judge at the time overturned the verdict — and its prison sentence of up to 60 years. A new prosecutor decided to retry the case in 1995, when Forte sought and received a series of health-related delays that have lasted decades.
A special team of prosecutors, assigned this month by the attorney general, is now pressing to move the 33-year-old case to trial.
Forte was due to call into a status conference last week. When he didn’t, the judge had threatened Forte with arrest if he didn’t phone into Thursday’s rescheduled hearing to discuss a trial timeline.
The defendant called as instructed, only to ask to be excused.
“Unfortunately his wife had a horrible fall,” Forte’s public defender, Susan McManus, told the court. “He is actually calling from the hospital.”
Judge John Valente declined the defendant’s request, noting the hearing would be short.
The slate of lawyers prosecuting the case for the Vermont Attorney General’s Office asked the court to schedule a trial as soon as possible. The prosecutorial team includes Assistant Attorney General Linda Purdy, Jeff Amestoy, a former state attorney general and Supreme Court chief justice, and Brian Burgess, a former deputy attorney general and Supreme Court associate justice.
The state’s lawyers noted that although a recent USA Today story reported the old files had been destroyed, they found a copy of the 1988 trial transcript as well as much of the original evidence.
“Everyone’s working hard to get this case trial-ready,” Purdy told the judge.
In response, Forte’s public defenders said they had only received their assignment this month.
“This case has a lot of moving parts and requires time in order to give everyone the opportunity for a fair trial,” McManus said. “To push this serves no one’s interest.”
Valente didn’t decide on a schedule Thursday other than to say “we’ll get an order out as soon as practically possible.”
But the judge declined a state request that Forte check in with Florida authorities twice a week and tabled any talk of seeking proof of his ongoing health claims, which led USA Today to headline its story with the defendant’s quote, “I’ve been dying for 25 years.”
The Bennington County state’s attorney first brought charges against Forte in 1987. A judge later overturned a guilty verdict in the case, ruling the female prosecutor had prejudiced the jury through her “emotional involvement” litigating the case with “a fury seldom seen this side of hell.”
Forte was supposed to return to Vermont to face the charges again in 1995, but he said he couldn’t because he was awaiting a heart transplant. He went on to claim he’d been removed from the transplant list in 2012 because of deteriorating health, then was undergoing surgery in 2014 with a high risk of death, then had been referred to hospice care in 2017 with six months to live.
A quarter-century after charges were filed, Forte has yet to physically appear in court.
“Instead, he has been living as a retiree in Florida, collecting boats, taking vacations and successfully fending off his trial by professing for more than two decades that he’s on the verge of death,” USA Today wrote in its story about what it calls “by far the oldest open prosecution in Vermont and certainly one of the oldest in the country where the defendant is not a fugitive.”
The 12-year-old girl who accused Forte of rape in 1987 is now a 45-year-old mother with teenagers. She listened in to Thursday’s hearing by phone.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Defendant surfaces for pre-trial hearing in 33-year-old sex assault case.