Tension between federal prosecutors and defense attorneys bubbled over Thursday as opposing sides revisit the trial of the man accused of killing Chandra Levy.
While defense attorneys press the Justice Department for more records concerning the key witness in the original trial, prosecutors insisted they’ve already been working overtime to cull thousands of documents.
“I don’t think the court understands, and certainly the defense doesn’t care, how much work has gone into this,” Assistant U.S. Attorney David J. Gorman said. “Frankly, I am ready to quit.”
Defense attorney Jonathan Anderson, in turn, voiced his own anger at the slow pace of getting information from the government.
“This is incredibly frustrating,” Anderson said at one point Thursday.
Anderson has been leading the post-trial defense charge on behalf of Ingmar Guandique, the Salvadoran immigrant convicted of first degree murder in November 2010. Guandique’s attorneys will be asking for a new trial, based on post-trial revelations about the informant past of Armando Morales, the key witness who testified that Guandique had confessed to him.
Raised in Modesto, Calif., Levy disappeared May 1, 2001. Her remains were found in Washington’s Rock Creek Park a year later.
As of this week, Anderson is also officially designated Guandique’s counsel. Santha Sonenberg, the Spanish-speaking Public Defender Service attorney who lead Guandique’s defense during the original trial, filed a motion to withdraw. Her last day with the Public Defender Service is Friday, March 20.
The hearing Thursday centered on defense efforts to obtain myriad specific documents concerning Morales, including his complete Bureau of Prisons file and visitor logs showing the time he spent with Fresno, Calif.-area relatives while he was incarcerated at U.S. Penitentiary Atwater in California.
“They’re out there,” Anderson said, referring to some specific prison documents, “unless someone deliberately threw them away.”
Gorman, noting that “the Bureau of Prisons is a huge, huge system,” said he’d keep looking.
“There is no answer I can give that will satisfy the defense,” Gorman said at one point, adding at another point that “we are getting slammed.”
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