New trial ordered in Chandra Levy murder case [View all]

[deminks]

This should feed the MEdia beast for a while.

http://www.kansascity.com/news/nation-world/article23091816.html

WASHINGTON —


A judge on Thursday ordered a new trial for the man convicted of killing former intern Chandra Levy.

Punctuating an extraordinary sequence of events that has slowly unfolded over the past several years, District of Columbia Superior Court Judge Gerald Fisher granted the new-trial request made by attorneys for Ingmar Guandique.

The new trial will feature different attorneys arguing before a new judge who must now come quickly up to speed on a murder mystery that has, at times, attracted both national notoriety and fevered speculation.

“I am not familiar with the facts,” D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert E. Morin said Thursday morning, “other than it’s a homicide.”

Morin will now learn that, based largely on the testimony of former Fresno gang leader Armando Morales, a jury in November 2010 convicted Guandique of first-degree murder for the 2001 killing of Levy. A 24-year-old former Bureau of Prisons intern, Levy was preparing to return to her family’s Modesto, Calif., home at the time of her death.

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