Manslaughter conviction vacated

BUFFALO (AP) — Less than a year and a half into a 25-year sentence, a man will be released from prison because a judge vacated his manslaughter conviction stemming from what authorities say was a dispute over a drug debt.

A state Supreme Court justice this week ruled that Alan Tomaski’s 2011 conviction in the death of Samuel Ciapa came after the five-year statute of limitations for that crime had expired.

Tomaski has been at Great Meadow Correctional Facility since March 2011. He is expected to be free by the weekend.

Ciapa’s body was found in a reservoir in suburban Buffalo in August 2002, two days after authorities say he was killed over a drug debt.

Police said he had been beaten, strangled and stabbed.

A jury convicted Tomaski of manslaughter but acquitted him of murder. Prosecutors cannot try him again for murder because of double-jeopardy laws.

Murder does not have a statute of limitations.

Tomaski’s attorneys told The Buffalo News that the prosecutor apparently made a mistake at trial when he requested that jurors be allowed to consider manslaughter if they did not convict Tomaski of second-degree murder.

The jury returned a firstdegree manslaughter conviction.

Tomaski’s attorneys moved to vacate the conviction after Tomaski raised the statute of limitations issue in a letter last summer.

The victim’s parents said they are stunned.

“The evidence against him was so overwhelming,” Marcia Ciapa, Samuel Ciapa’s mother, told the newspaper. “I don’t want to know about a technicality. I don’t know how I’m supposed to act or think. I’m in shock. I just want to scream.”

Erie County District Attorney Frank A. Sedita III said he would not criticize prosecutor James Bargnesi’s request for the lesser charge.

“He thought that was the best strategy to employ based on how the trial testimony came out,” Sedita said.

Sedita’s office had argued the conviction should stand, saying Tomaski lived in West Virginia for 324 days between 2003 and 2004 and that the time should not have counted against the five-year limit.

Tomaski’s grandmother, however, produced her diaries as proof he was living with her in New York for much of that time.