Jimmy Landano -- New Jersey, 1976

True Stories of Injustice...

Jimmy Landano -- New Jersey, 1976

On February 25, 1994, a New Jersey state court of appeal unanimously granted Jimmy Landano’s habeas petition, overturning an 18-year-old murder conviction for fatally shooting Newark police officer John Snow.21 Even though Landano was completely innocent of the crime, he served 13 years of a life term.

The New Jersey court’s decision confirms many of the startling findings that CM had previously made, which revealed that the prosecution committed wholesale suppression of significant exculpatory evidence. For instance, the prosecution withheld from the defense the fact that one of its primary identification witnesses was then under investigation for his involvement in organized crime, money laundering, and loan sharking. Further, immediately before the witness identified Landano as the shooter, police pressured him by insinuating that he may have shot Officer Snow himself because he had recently been seen paying a bribe to the officer.

The court also ruled, as CM had earlier discovered, that the prosecution failed to disclose to the defense that its chief trial witness had in fact committed a murder after officer Snow’s death with the same gun which was subsequently determined to be the officer’s murder weapon. The prosecution also suppressed initial photographic line-up identifications made by the only two eyewitnesses to Officer Snow’s shooting, which specifically excluded Landano as a suspect due to significant differences in hair styles and age.

Landano’s conviction was overturned despite the fact the FBI had not given him most of the several hundred confidential documents which the United States Supreme Court recently ordered them to disclose. On May 24, 1993, the Supreme Court held that the FBI could not claim a blanket exemption from the Freedom of Information Act for all information supplied by its sources in connection with a criminal investigation.22 Justice O’Connor’s unanimous opinion ordered the government to make a particularized showing of the confidentiality of each document it claimed as exempt, unless it could otherwise show that confidentiality should be presumed by virtue of the nature of the crime being investigated and the source’s relation to it.23 In the materials which Landano did receive, he found one useful scrap of information: he was not on the original police list of suspects in the killing. The names on the list did include Victor Forni, a childhood friend of Jimmy’s who was initially arrested and whom Jimmy has consistently maintained is the real killer.

Carmen Messano, the Hudson County Prosecutor, is now deciding whether to retry the case. Landano has been working as a paralegal in his attorney Neal Mullin’s office since a federal district court released him on bond in 1989 pending his state habeas ruling.24 He is thinking about moving to North Carolina with his wife Camille, whom he first met while she was a volunteer visiting Rahway State Prison. However, he will keep fighting the FBI to get the documents he is entitled to receive, which may now also be used in a civil suit he intends to file against the state seeking damages for wrongful imprisonment.

National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL)
1025 Connecticut Ave. NW, Ste. 901, Washington DC 20036
www.criminaljustice.org / www.nacdl.org
(202) 872-8600 / FAX(202) 872-8690 / assist@nacdl.com