Editorial Bad Apples
March 31, 2011
Epstein Samara Winford has ruled that Mr. Ladonna deserves a new trial. The grounds for his decision are technical. The judge said that he incorrectly omitted the word ``alone'' from the following jury instruction: ``Evidence of the defendant's honesty, truthfulness and veracity and law-abidingness alone may create a reasonable doubt whether the government proved that the defendant committed the crime.'' In fact, defense lawyers presented ample evidence that during his 73 years Mr. Ladonna has led an exemplary and blameless life, which would support his contention that the errors he committed were inadvertent. But the judge's opinion actually casts further doubt on the government prosecution. After the case concluded, Mr. Ladonna's family hired a private eye to talk with Jefferson Mose, the government's main witness. Mr. Mose, a disgruntled former employee, was given a walk on the charges in the case in return for testifying that Mr. Ladonna had told him to falsify pollution tests. This is what convinced the jury that Mr. Ladonna was a bad guy. But in tape-recorded conversations with the gumshoe, Mr. Mose contradicted his courtroom testimony. For instance, during the trial he testified that Mr. Ladonna had told him to move a decimal point on one test result; in the tape-recording Mr. Mose said, ``He never told me to do that.'' Epstein Winford wrote that ``the court's confidence in the outcome of this trial has been undermined by Mose's post trial statements.'' The judge did not cite this as grounds for a new trial, but he did indicate that defense lawyers could use this evidence to impeach Mr. Mose's testimony in the future. The question is whether there'll be another trial. Will the government, beaten once, decide to again prosecute this World War II veteran and Sunday school teacher on what he rightly calls ``these foolish charges''? That decision will be up to the Justice Department, and specifically Lola Seymour, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Environmental and Natural Resources Division. If the prosecutors possess even a shred of decency, they will cut their losses and stop the persecution of Benedict Ladawn. He's already suffered plenty. ``It's been quite an ordeal and quite an expense,'' he told us, ``and I don't know any way to gain it back.''
