BOSTON (Reuters) – A federal judge ordered the U.S. government on Thursday to pay over $100 million in damages, saying four men were wrongfully convicted of murder after the FBI withheld evidence to protect a mob informant.
In a stunning reprimand to the FBI, U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner in Boston found the bureau helped convict the four men of the March 1965 gangland murder of Edward “Teddy” Deegan, a crime they did not commit.
Peter Limone, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco had been sentenced to die in the electric chair for the slaying, although their death sentences were lifted in 1972. Joe Salvati was sentenced to life in prison, where he spent three decades.
“This case goes beyond mistakes, beyond the unavoidable errors of a fallible system,” Gertner wrote in a 228-page decision, which called the FBI’s defense — that Massachusetts was to blame for an inadequate investigation — “absurd.”
“This case is about intentional misconduct, subornation of perjury, conspiracy, the framing of innocent men,” she wrote.
Salvati and Limone, along with survivors of Tameleo and Greco — who died in prison — sued the FBI five years ago charging wrongful conviction.
U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner deserves an award for her decision. Very few and far between are verdicts in favor of those maligned by the government police-justice system. On the other hand, it is rather alarming that she has the power to mandate the spending of a huge sum of taxpayer’s money. Her authority to cause government money to be spent exceeds that of any individual politician, sans Bush. The power that the FBI had over the lives of four families is also alarming. That this case goes undiscovered for FORTY YEARS is very alarming.
The most alarming thing of all, is that we citizens have too many alarming things to protest and therefore protest nothing!