The longest-running court case in Vermont history will remain an open file, even though the suspect died before a new trial could be held.
In a ruling first reported in the Bennington Banner, Judge Cortland Corsones ruled Friday in Bennington Superior criminal court that the files will remain open in an unresolved 1987 criminal case, rejecting defense arguments that Leonard Forte died an innocent man in the eyes of the law, so his charges should be erased from the record.
“Criminal cases that are incomplete at the time of the defendant’s death are buried with the defendant,” Forte’s lead defense attorney, Susan McManus, had argued at a hearing on Monday.
Forte, a former New York police officer, died in December at age 80 after nearly 35 years of dodging allegations that he sexually assaulted a 12-year-old girl at his Landgrove vacation home in 1987.
At the hearing Monday, state prosecutors asked the court not to wipe the charges of sexual assault and obstruction of justice against Forte. He was convicted in a 1988 trial, but the presiding judge overturned the verdict on grounds that the prosecuting attorney was “too emotional,” and ordered a new trial, which never came about.
Jeffrey Amestoy, former chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court, was the Vermont attorney general during Forte’s first trial. He made the argument this week to keep Forte’s case files in the public eye.
Acting as a special assistant attorney general, Amestoy said Vermont’s expungement law was intended to help people who wanted a “fresh start” after run-ins with the law, unlike Forte, who he said was “interested in obstructing justice.” The open court files, he said, will show how the state failed to secure justice for Forte’s victim.
Forte, who’d been living in Florida, had argued for decades that his case should be thrown out because he was too sick to travel to Vermont for a new trial. He’d presented a doctor’s note that prosecutors now say was faked. They also accused him of lying about having been in hospice care.
Forte died in December of sudden cardiac arrest, according to his death certificate filed with the court. He’d been tentatively scheduled for a retrial this spring after a new presiding judge found he was physically capable of standing trial in Vermont.
Expungement now, the prosecution said Monday in a written motion, “would amount to the court permanently deleting any record of this case, as if the victim had never reported, the defendant had never been charged, and as if there had been no trial resulting in convictions that were set aside — in fact, as if this case never existed at all.”
Judge Corsones agreed with Amestoy’s argument, ruling that “the interests of justice require a departure from the presumptive seal or expungement of a criminal history record.”
The girl Forte allegedly assaulted, Michele Dinko, now 47, also asked Monday that the judge keep Forte’s case files open as a warning that the legal system cannot be subverted.
“I can never wrap my head around why this happened,” she said in a personal court appearance Monday, her voice choking with emotion. “Am I not that important? It’s OK for you to be raped, and Mr. Forte not held accountable for another trial.”
Dinko, a registered nurse and mother of two teenagers, said she was inspired by her daughter to continue fighting in court.
“This case needs to stay open for all people to see, to learn that it can never happen again to anybody,” she said. “This is my last fight for what is right.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Judge rules Forte case to stay open, despite defendant’s death.