Lawyers in Chandra Levy Case: We Have Our Man

Prosecutors acknowledged Monday that police made a huge mistake nearly a decade ago when they focused on then-Congressman Gary Condit in the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy, but they told a jury they now have the right man.

Ingmar Guandique, of El Salvador, is charged with the attempted sexual assault, kidnapping and killing of Levy in the city's Rock Creek Park in May 2001. Levy was romantically linked to Condit, and the California Democrat was once a suspect. Police no longer believe he had anything to do with Levy's death.

In her opening statement, prosecutor Amanda Haines told the jury that "law enforcement really let Miss Levy and her family down. They veered in the wrong direction because of the media and sensationalism."

She said Condit tried - and is still trying - to keep his affair with Levy a secret, and that led investigators to assume he was the prime suspect and "allowed Mr. Guandique to hide in plain sight."

A spokesman for Condit said the former congressman expects to testify.

Haines also acknowledged that prosecutors have no physical evidence or eyewitnesses, but said Guandique confessed the murder to prison cellmates, and that Levy's death fits the pattern of other attacks he made on young women in Rock Creek Park in the spring and summer of 2001. He was serving 10 years in prison for those attacks when he was charged in the Levy case.

Guandique, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, is barely a blip on the national consciousness of the case, which dominated news coverage until the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks rendered it an afterthought.

Convicting Guandique, however, won't be easy, reports CBS News correspondent Whit Johnson. In addition to the lack of physical evidence, he never confessed to police, and he even passed a lie detector test in the case, though prosecutors now question the validity of that test.
 
"All the prosecution really has, as far as we know, is the fact that Guandique told his fellow inmates that he killed Chandra Levy," the Washington Post's Keith Alexander told CBS News.

Defense attorney Maria Hawilo scoffed at the prosecution's case and said Guandique has been made a scapegoat. She said DNA evidence found on Levy's jogging tights in Rock Creek Park did not come from Levy, Guandique or Condit. Prosecutors have said that DNA is likely a result of contamination in the evidence handling process.

"The police failed and fumbled this investigation," Hawilo said. "They can't fix their failure. They can't undo their mistakes. ... They have turned him into an easy scapegoat."

Hawilo did not mention Condit at all in her opening statement.

While police no longer believe Condit had anything to do with Levy's death, his presence will continue to hang over the trial. Condit's spokesman, Bert Fields said Condit will cooperate fully with authorities. But the ex-congressman, who is writing a book about his experience, will not comment on the trial until it ends.

Exactly what role Condit will play in the trial is unclear. Defense attorneys could be tempted to remind jurors that police were suspicious of Condit for so long, said attorney George Jackson, a Chicago-based lawyer with the Polsinelli Shughart law firm and a former federal prosecutor.

Jackson said the defense will have to tread lightly because jurors will be put off if they sense attorneys are trying to make an innocent man into a scapegoat. And the government will surely be ready to counter suggestions that Condit was involved. But because Condit is so closely linked to the case in the public's eye, the defense has some leeway to approach the issue with subtlety.

"If it's feasible to suggest that this guy may have been involved, you put it out there" to help create reasonable doubt in a jury's mind, Jackson said. "But it's a dangerous thing to do because you don't know if there will be a backlash."