Limone v. FBI

Client:

Juliane Balliro, Esq.

Christine Griffin, Esq.

Wolf, Block LLP (dissolved)
Boston, MA

 

Austin McGuigan, Esq.

Joseph Burns, Esq.

Chris Morano, Esq.

Rome McGuigan, PC

Hartford, CT

 

Richard Bickelman, Esq.

Ian Moss, Esq.

Posternack, Blankenstein & Lund, LLP

Boston, MA

 

Daniel Duetsch, Esq.

Deutsch, Williams, Brooks, Derensis, & Holand, PC

Boston, MA

 

Howard Friedman, Esq.

Law Offices of Howard Friedman, PC

Boston, MA

 

Victor Garo, Esq.

Law Offices of Victor J. Garo

Medford, MA

 

Professor Michael Avery

Suffolk University Law School

Boston, MA

 

Case Summary:

 

On July 31, 1968, Peter Limone, Joseph Salvati, Louis Greco and Henry Tameleo were convicted of murdering Edward Deegan. Joseph "The Animal" Barboza, a notorious mob hitman turned FBI informant, provided information framing the four men in order to protect Deegan's true killer, Vincent "Jimmie the Bear" Flemmi.

 

The plaintiffs sued the FBI for wrongful imprisonment, citing newly discovered documents, never turned over during the prosecution of the plaintiffs, which showed that the FBI knew Barboza was lying but proceeded with the prosecution anyway. The FBI argued that they acted properly in using Barboza as an informant, and that after turning Barboza over to Suffolk County prosecutors, the state independently prosecuted the four men.

 

In July 2007, U.S. District Court Judge Nancy Gertner found for the plaintiffs and awarded the men and their families $101.7 in damges, the largest verdict of its kind.

 

The Challenge:

 

The case involved a series of events spanning 40 years. In addition, details for those events were contained in over 300,000 documents. The principle challenge facing the plaintiffs was that they needed easy access to that massive amount of evidence as well as an effective way to visually communicate their story. They asked us to address how to persuasively explain to a judge at trial what it is like to spend up to 33 years of your life behind bars when wrongfully convicted.

 

Another key issue in the case was whether the federal government essentially controlled the state prosecution of the plaintiffs, thus allowing the plaintiffs to sue the FBI for wrongful imprisonment. When WIN Interactive began working on the case, a complicated binder of documents contained the story of federal control of the state's prosecution.

 

 

The WIN Solution:

• Digital Document Retrieval: Our first task was to provide fast, seamless document access at trial using BriefCase. We digitized all the documents and integrated them into our system. From there, we could call up any document onto the courtroom screens at will, and highlight the documents immediately.

• Focusing the Story: We first needed to focus the story by narrowing all the information down to the key events and documents to provide a visual representation of the story. At our request, the plaintiff's lawyers provided us with 300 key documents and events. From there, we built three seperate, but connected, timelines using TimeSpan. Each one covered a different aspect of the case.

• TimeSpan: We created three interactive timelines for trial. The first timeline spanned 40 years and contained the big picture events of the case. We also included a graphical representation of the amount of time the four plaintiffs spent in incarceration. The second timeline represented the events surrounding the original investigation and prosecution of the four plaintiffs. The third timeline, discussed below, was a calendar timeline on the issue of federal control of the state prosecution. Like all TimeSpan timelines, clicking on an event called up the supporting document, with pre-set annotations and callouts. We created additional annotations and callouts on-the-fly as needed.

• Calendar Timeline: Over 90 different meetings took place between the feds, state prosecutors, and the informant. We quickly realized these 90 events were essentially one event, and proceeded to map the history of the government's involvement with the informant on a calendar. Layering dates in which the feds met with the informant onto the calendar made it visually clear that the feds controlled the state prosecution. For more detail on the functionality of the calendar timeline, please view the video demo.

• Equipment and Trial Assistance: We ran two laptop computers with access to the thousads of pages of documents that the attorneys wanted access to. One computer ran document presentation software while the other computer had a more focused set of documents accessible via the interactive timeline. Present at all times in court was a computer operator as well as a technical assistant to ensure that the presentation went smoothly.

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WIN Tools Used