A FOIA Case: Vincent James Landano (page 2)
Their efforts appeared to have paid off when a key prosecution eyewitness recanted in 1981. Investigators manipulated him into identifying Landano as driver of the getaway car, he said. The witness, a truck driver who saw the getaway car and its driver, said they first showed him a picture "line-up" of eight suspects and he quickly identified one. But they took away that photograph and asked him to pick a different one, directing his attention to Landano's picture.
"If he was fatter, he could be the one," the witness remembered telling them.
Although U.S. District Court Judge H. Lee Sarokin found the witness credible, he wrote that "judicial restraint" forced his hand. A state court had earlier dismissed this recantation and Sarokin said a statute obligating Federal courts to defer to the findings of state courts in such matters legally bound him. He pointedly wrote in his 43-page ruling that Landano was victim of a miscarriage of justice.
Small comfort for Landano but he persevered and soon he learned prosecutors had other witnesses that they did not tell him or his lawyer about, and these witnesses consistently identified Forni as both the shooter and driver. That became the basis of another appeal and, this time, Judge Sarokin released Landano in 1989, saying the record proved prosecutors "systematically" withheld information that showed Landano as innocent and pointed to someone else as the killer.
Landano had served 13 years. Prosecutors, denying they deliberately hid evidence, later indicted Landano on the same charges.
