Vermont State Police say they are charging a Florida man with obstruction of justice, as his sexual assault case in Bennington County has been delayed for more than three decades because of his claims that he was dying.
The charges are the latest legal twist in the case against 79-year-old Leonard Forte, a former detective with the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office in New York now living in LaBelle, Florida.
Forte is set to be arraigned Wednesday, July 7, in Bennington County Superior criminal court on two felony counts of obstruction of justice, according to Vermont State Police.
A jury convicted Forte in 1988 on three counts of rape of a 12-year-old girl in Bennington County. Forte appealed those convictions, and was granted a new trial in 1989.
The case has been working its way through the legal system ever since, with the Vermont Attorney General’s Office in 1997 refiling charges against Forte, who had indicated he was awaiting a heart transplant and was too sick to stand trial.
The prosecution then entered into a stipulation with Forte, requiring him to provide the state with a medical update every six months.
In 2019, an investigation by USA Today, Naples Daily News and the Burlington Free Press highlighted decades of foot-dragging in resolving the case and called into question Forte’s claims about his health.
Vermont State Police, along with special agents assigned to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, then investigated Forte’s claims.
State police said Wednesday investigators have “determined that Forte misrepresented his health claims and his inability to travel to Vermont,” leading to the two counts of obstruction of justice.
No other details related to the charges were immediately available, with state police saying Wednesday they had no further immediate comment.
More information is expected to become available next week, once Forte is arraigned in court and an affidavit in support of the charges becomes public.
Susan McManus, a public defender representing Forte, could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday afternoon. Vermont Public Defender Matthew Valerio, reached late Wednesday afternoon, declined comment on the case.
The Vermont Attorney General’s Office and the Vermont Department of State’s Attorneys and Sheriffs are prosecuting Forte on the sex charges.
Charity Clark, chief of staff for Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan, said Wednesday afternoon that, since probable cause has not yet been found for the latest charges against Forte, the office couldn’t comment on the matter.
According to the 2019 USA Today report, a jury in 1988 convicted Forte on three counts of sexual assault. However, Judge Theodore Mandeville threw out the convictions, finding that the prosecutor had been overly emotional during the closing argument.
Mandeville wrote that the prosecutor displayed “a fury seldom seen this side of hell,” USA Today reported.
Bennington County Judge Cortland Corsones recently issued a decision that Forte has the physical capacity to stand trial in Vermont.
“The defendant has been advising the court for years that he cannot travel to Vermont to attend trial, yet in 2016 he made a three-month trip to New York, and in 2019 he made a three-week trip to New Jersey,” Corsones wrote in his ruling last week.
“The defendant is able to safely travel,” the judge wrote, “when it is something he wants to do.”
