Reasonable doubt in the Chandra Levy case
How reliable is the conviction of Ingmar Guandique for the 2001 murder, when the key evidence is a disputed prison confession?
Stewart J Lawrence
Friday 26 November 2010 20.00 GMT
Chandra Levy, the murdered congressman's aide whose body was found in 2002. El Salvador-born petty criminal Ingmar Guandique has been convicted for her murder in November 2010. Photograph: AP/Associated Press
Jurors in the 9-year-old murder case of Chandra Levy found Ingmar Guandique, born in El Salvador, guilty of killing Levy last week, after three days of deliberation. According to the prosecution's case, Levy had been jogging in Washington, DC's Rock Creek Park when a man, allegedly Guandique, dragged her down an enbankment and tried to rob, and possibly rape, her. When she resisted, he killed her and fled, they said.
The case captivated the nation for months, initially because the pretty young political intern had disappeared, in 2001, apparently without trace. But then, it also emerged that Levy had likely been having an affair with her married boss, Democratic Congressman Gary Condit. Condit was never named by police as a suspect in the case, but the public appetite for political scandal kept the media focus on him. But no evidence linked Condit to the crime, and the longer the case dragged on, the less likely it seemed that it would ever be solved.
When Levy's body (or rather, some skeletal remains) were finally found, it was 2002, a year after her disappearance. And the "sleuth" turned out to be a middle-aged dog-walker, who stumbled upon her remains in the very area the police claimed to have searched so meticulously 12 months earlier. The discovery fuelled growing criticism of the DC police department, and the detectives in its special investigative branch. Media reports soon revealed that the detective branch was severely underfunded, poorly-trained and understaffed.
Then came the revelation that police had known for months about a homeless Latino man – later identified as Guandique – who'd been stalking and stealing from female joggers in Rock Creek Park, including one who had fought him off and escaped the very day that Levy disappeared. It turned out that DC detectives had interviewed Guandique in jail after his conviction for one of those assaults. But after he passed a lie detector test, they decided he wasn't their man.
Meanwhile, in 2002, Condit stood for re-election but was savaged by voters, largely because of the stain from the Levy scandal. He later reteated to Arizona to sell real estate, and wasn't heard from again until called to testify in the trial of Guandique.
The big "break" in the case did not come from the discovery of any new physical evidence. It was a jailhouse "confession", made by Guandique to one of his cellmates – including Salvadoran gang members – while he was serving time for two attempted park robberies.
And this is where the case gives some veteran lawyers and advocates for poor defendants real cause for alarm. Jailhouse confessions are notoriously problematic, because the informants are usually other prisoners who obtain reduced sentences for squealing on their fellow inmates.
An investigation by the Los Angeles Times a decade ago revealed that some police departments were in the habit of deliberately planting informants in cells with prisoners who had never been convicted of more serious crimes like murder, with the express intent of eliciting a "confession". The US supreme court has ruled that informants in this setting are de facto police interrogators, and therefore, the practice violates the targeted inmate's due process rights, including their right to have a lawyer present during questioning. But many police departments, the Times found, simply disguise their planting of informants, knowing that it rarely comes to light.
The Times report documented numerous instances where jailhouse informants had elicited "confessions" that turned out never to have occurred, in exchange for a lighter sentence. The potential for abuse is ever-present, but its effects are especially pernicious when no other physical evidence links the accused person to the crime to which they have supposedly confessed. This was the case with Guandique.
Guandique has never admitted confessing to killing Levy. The man who accused him of making the confession, meanwhile, did receive a reduced sentence for fingering him. Another accuser, a woman who says Guandique confessed in a letter he sent her from prison, couldn't produce the letter when asked. She claimed she must have thrown it away.
And yet, jurors in the case said last week that Guandique's alleged jailhouse confession was the main piece of evidence that convinced them that he must have killed Levy. They were also moved by the emotional testimony of one of the women whom Guandique had robbed in the same park where Levy's remains were found.
The only physical evidence, however, which was taken from an article of Levy's clothing found at the scene, contained DNA that belonged to neither Levy nor Guandique. Police officers testified in the trial they have no idea whose it was. They can't even prove that Levy was killed where her remains were found, rather than her body having been dumped there after she was slain elsewhere. No witness saw Levy jogging in the park on the day the murder is supposed to have taken place.
Critics of the trial, like Maryland attorney Gladys Weatherspoon, who represented Guandique in his earlier defence, says she is stunned and appalled by the jury's verdict. In addition to the obvious evidential problems, she says the jury was not allowed to hear that Guandique had once passed a lie detector test or that police had ruled him out of any role in Levy's death at the time they had charged him with the two robberies.
"This case isn't what it appears to be, and it should never have come to trial," Weatherspoon told me. She accuses the jury – and the judge – of being swayed by their emotional identification with the defendant and the other robbery victims, and by what she sees as their susceptibility to a wish to allow the Levy family, especially Chandra's mother, obtain "closure" in the case.
The prosecution called Gary Condit in the hope of removing any doubt that he, not Guandqiue, committed the crime. When Guandique's lawyers tried to probe Condit about his relationship with Levy, and to cast doubt on his alibi, the trial judge sustained the prosecution's objections. Condit was evasive in his testimony, but this was apparently not enough to create "reasonable doubt" about Guandique's guilt. Nor was the sworn testimony of another of Guandique's cellmates who said he knew Guandique well, and that he had never indicated that he had killed Levy.
Weatherspoon says the jurors didn't seem to realise that Guandique was only a "weak teenage kid" when he committed his earlier robberies, not the full-grown 30-year-old man – and gang-member – which, to them, he appeared to be in court. Yet, the prosecution succeeded in planting in the jurors' minds that those earlier robberies were assaults, and possible preludes to murder, had the women not escaped.
Weatherspoon insists this idea is preposterous. "These women were older and much bigger than Guandique, and all he did was snatch their Walkmans," she says. "This was more like purse-snatching, and yet the prosecution threw the book at him, and he ended up getting a 10-year sentence." Court records show that Guandique was never charged with assault, let alone attempted rape or murder, in those earlier cases.
Defence lawyers say they plan to appeal Guandique's conviction. It turns out that one juror was not convinced of Guandique's guilt. She refused to go along with the guilty verdict that the rest of the jurors had decided upon after their first two days of deliberation. The other jurors criticised her for not taking notes during the trial, and insisted she spend the weekend reading over theirs. She did, and on Monday decided to acquiesce in the guilty verdict. Weatherspoon says that constitutes blatant jury misconduct. But she's skeptical, given the high-pressure climate surrounding the case, whether it's enough to win her former client a new trial.
So, was Guandique, in effect, railroaded? Weatherspoon is unsure, but she says that the culture surrounding high-profile cases involving missing young women, and the judge and jury's emotional biases, plus an indigent and unsympathetic defendant, create a significant risk of miscarriage of justice in these settings.
"I don't think people realise how dangerous it is to have some people convicted after this much time when there's no solid evidence, and so many unresolved questions," she says. "I feel sad for Guandique. He was just a kid."
