BENNINGTON — A former law enforcement officer fighting decades-old child sexual assault charges has been found mentally competent to stand trial, prosecutors said Monday.
Attorneys for the defendant, Leonard Forte, 80, previously asked the court to order a mental competency evaluation and psychological testing to determine if he was fit to face criminal charges due to cognitive and memory issues.
Forte, a retired investigator with New York’s Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, is accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl at his Landgrove vacation home in 1987. He was convicted of three sexual assault charges the following year, but the presiding judge granted his request for a new trial, saying the female prosecutor had prejudiced the jury by being too emotional.
The state charged him again in 1997, but the case remained in limbo for more than two decades while Forte continually claimed to be too sick to travel to Vermont and stand trial. He has since moved to LaBelle, Florida, a city just east of Fort Myers.
At a hearing Monday afternoon, lead prosecutor Linda Purdy said the mental competency evaluation and psychological testing results have come back “saying that Mr. Forte is able and competent to stand trial.”
The results, separately filed in court last month, are sealed from public view.
Forte’s lead attorney, Susan McManus, asked the court to give defense experts time to review the evaluation results. She asked for up to eight weeks, citing the shortage of local psychiatrists who can take on the work.
Purdy, a Bennington deputy state’s attorney, objected to the request, saying the case has dragged on long enough. In a hearing last year, she described the case as likely one of the oldest criminal cases documented in the U.S.
Superior Judge Cortland Corsones granted the defense’s request. In about three months, the court will prepare to hold a hearing should defense experts have a different opinion on Forte’s mental competency.
Corsones earlier ruled that Forte is physically able to stand trial, following a multiday hearing over four months. The court provisionally scheduled him for a jury draw in March.
The case complainant, who is now in her mid-40s, attended the Monday hearing remotely. She has said she is willing to return to court and testify.
This summer, state prosecutors opened a new criminal case against Forte. They filed twin charges of obstruction of justice, accusing him of faking a doctor’s note and lying about a hospice stay to evade prosecution.
In Florida, Forte pleaded not guilty Oct. 26 to two state felony charges for which he had been arrested about a week earlier.
Police’s probable cause statement in Forte’s arrest warrant shows his Florida charges are entwined with those in Vermont.
He is charged with illegally using another person’s ID after he allegedly submitted a fake doctor’s letter to the Vermont Superior criminal court in June 2019. Police said he blacked out the letter’s original 2016 date and made it appear that the doctor currently believed “Forte was unable to travel and testify,” the affidavit stated.
The doctor who issued the original letter, Dr. Shailaja Hegde, reportedly told investigators she did not authorize the letter’s duplication or its presentation to the court in 2019.
“In fact, Leonard Forte was not even a patient of Dr. Hegde’s in June of 2019,” the probable cause statement read.
Forte is also charged with using a two-way communications device to facilitate a felony, accusing him of using a phone to call into a June 21, 2019, Vermont hearing to assert that the blacked-out doctor’s letter was authentic.
Forte’s attorney in Florida, James Ermacora, entered the not guilty pleas on his behalf and waived the associated court appearance scheduled for Nov. 16, according to records with the state’s Twentieth Judicial Circuit.
Forte was released from jail on the same day he was arrested, after posting the 10% premium on a $20,000 surety bond.
