New trial expected in Chandra Levy murder
WASHINGTON -- A man convicted of killing Washington, D.C. intern Chandra Levy is expected to get a new trial after government attorneys withdrew their opposition.
On Friday, after more than a year of sporadic hearings and legal wrangling, government attorneys dropped their opposition to a new trial for Ingmar Guandique in a four-page motion. They said they were preparing for a new trial.
Guandique, an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador, was convicted in 2010 of killing the 24-year-old Levy in 2001. He is serving a 60-year prison sentence.
Levy was an intern for the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, before she was murdered in 2001. Her death attracted heightened attention because of her romantic relationship with then-congressman Gary Condit (D-Calif).
Her body was found in Washington, D.C.'s Rock Creek Park.
Attorneys for Guandique had asked a judge to grant him a new trial because they said a key witness in the case, Guandique's one-time cellmate Armando Morales, gave false or misleading testimony during his 2010 trial. Guandique's attorneys said prosecutors knew or should have known the testimony was problematic and investigated further.
The U.S. Attorney's Office began investigating Morales' testimony in 2011, after the Fresno County, Calif., Sheriff's Department alerted the office to its own interviews conducted with Morales more than a decade earlier, prosecutors said in a court document filed Friday.
Prosecutors said the interviews contained information that "prompted an extensive investigation" of potential issues with Morales' testimony, leading the U.S. Attorney's office to turn over to Guandique's attorneys thousands of pages of documents related to Morales.