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New look at Martin Tankleff trial

BY ALFONSO A. CASTILLO | alfonso.castillo@newsday.com

9:04 PM EDT, June 15, 2008

Martin Tankleff (Newsday Photos / Michael E. Ach)

Over 10 warm spring weeks in 1990, 12 men and women gathered in a stuffy courtroom to sit in judgment of a Belle Terre student charged in one of the most horrific crimes Suffolk County had ever known.

After deliberating for eight days, the Riverhead jury convicted Martin Tankleff, then 19, of murdering his mother, Arlene, and father, Seymour.

Tankleff had served 17 years of a 50-years-to life sentence when an appellate court overturned his conviction last December, swayed in part by considerable new evidence of the involvement of other possible suspects.

Tankleff is still waiting to hear from state prosecutors to see whether they intend to dismiss the charges or retry him. Prosecutors with the state attorney general's office, which took over the case from Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota in January, are expected to announce whether they intend to dismiss all charges against Tankleff, 36, or retry him.

Through the years, the complex case has been reduced to a simple shorthand, easily summarized in the thousands of stories about it: Tankleff says he was forced to confess and that the real killer was his father's business partner, who owed Seymour Tankleff hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But the transcript of the trial, analyzed by Newsday over several weeks, offers insights and perspectives largely unexplored in recent news accounts of the case.

Officials in the Suffolk district attorney's office, including the case's prosecutor, John Collins -- now the office's chief trial prosecutor -- declined to comment pending a decision from the attorney general on Tankleff's charges. The three detectives who investigated the case and testified, and the trial's judge, Alfred Tisch, also declined to comment.

THE SETTING

Although it wasn't presented to the jury, the allegations of police misconduct that were at the heart of Tankleff's defense echoed many similar complaints that plagued the department for years, and were the subject of a nearly 200-page State Investigation Commission report released just a year earlier.

The commission, which noted that it received "more than twice as many" allegations of misconduct in the Suffolk police department and district attorney's office as any other county in the state, blasted the county's law enforcement agencies for having a mindset that "You do what you've got to do in order to arrest and convict."

The same report criticized Suffolk for relying on confessions at the expense of taking "routine investigative steps."

The State Investigation Commission's probe was one of a half dozen probes into allegations of misconduct and corruption in the police department around the time, including those conducted by a grand jury, the Suffolk County Bar Association and one commissioned by the county executive. All found significant problems in the department.

Tankleff's arrest and subsequent confession also came two years after Newsday published a series of investigative stories dealing with Suffolk police's 94 percent confession rate in homicide cases from 1976 to 1986 -- a rate significantly higher than in comparable counties. In its report, the commission said the rate was "so astonishingly high ... that, in and of itself, it provokes skepticism regarding Suffolk County's use of confessions."

Amid the public lambasting, in 1989 District Attorney Patrick Henry announced he would not run for re-election. That opened the door for Tankleff's defense attorney, Robert Gottlieb, to run as the Democratic candidate. It was only after completing pre-trial hearings in the Tankleff case that Gottlieb learned that the case's judge, Alfred Tisch, was being considered for the Republican nomination.

Gottlieb demanded that Tisch remove himself from the case, but Tisch refused. GOP party leaders ultimately backed James Catterson Jr., who went on to defeat Gottlieb.

EVIDENCE AND REASONABLE DOUBT "All this time, Marty was just screaming, 'murder, murder,' and I just ran after him," said one of the first witnesses in the trial, the Tankleffs' neighbor Morton Hova.

Collins asked if, despite Tankleff's screams, Hova ever saw him cry.

"No, I didn't see him cry," he responded.

Prosecutors relied on three types of evidence, much of it circumstantial, in making a case against Tankleff: his disputed confession, testimony intended to establish a motive for Tankleff to commit the crime and show his lack of emotion to his parents' deaths, and forensic evidence, which defense attorneys said more clearly pointed away from Tankleff than toward him.

Among the witnesses called by prosecutors were three young acquaintances of Tankleff who testified that weeks before the killings, they heard him talk about all the money he would inherit if his parents were dead and Tankleff's coworker at a bagel store, who said he witnessed what appeared to be an argument between Seymour and Martin days before the murders. And Belle Terre Bay Constable -- and Tankleff family friend -- Donald Hines testified that while talking to Tankleff at the scene, Tankleff looked up and "his eyes widened" when Hines told him that police were with his father in chase he awoke from his coma.