Neither Gantt nor Smith testified, and the jury never heard Gantt's explanation of how he came to be carrying the matchbook.
Several jurors, some of whom spoke on condition that their names not be used, said they vigorously debated the evidence. Although skeptical of the car burglar, they said they found the accountant's testimony and the matchbook evidence compelling. One juror carefully compared Vardhan's handwriting against the matchbook numbers.
"That was very significant for all of us," said another juror.
"It looked damning," yet another recalled.
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Gantt's attorney had not anticipated the prosecutor's being allowed to use the matchbook and the handwriting expert at the trial. Immediately after the verdicts, he sought his own forensic expert, who concluded that Vardhan probably did not write the numbers on the matchbook.
But the new opinion was not enough to overturn the conviction. On May 25, 1994, Gantt and Smith were sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Gantt began to spend as much time as he could in prison law libraries, working on his case.
"I felt . . . I had been done so wrong," he said. "I had to fight. No one else was fighting for me."
He examined documents that a former appellate attorney had found in the prosecutor's file. Prosecutors are required to give the defense information that might help their case, but Gantt said he had never seen the records before.
Authorities knew by the last day of trial that the owner of the Bangladeshi phone number had a son who worked as a waiter at the Shalimar restaurant. The records showed that a district attorney's investigator had interviewed the waiter and that neither the waiter nor his father in Bangladesh knew the victim or recognized him from a photograph.
Though the waiter told authorities that the handwriting on the matchbook was not his and that he never visited the downtown area where Gantt lived, the new evidence raised doubts about the prosecution's theory. Why would the victim have been carrying a matchbook with the Bangladeshi home phone number of someone he didn't know?
In 1999, Gantt wrote a new appeal arguing that the prosecutor withheld evidence that would have helped him.
More than five years later, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor.
