Thank You, Mr. Condit
At last, my burning questions are answered.

Mr. Dunphy* is an officer of the Los Angeles Police Department
August 31, 2001 8:15 a.m.

sat down to watch Connie Chung's interview with Gary Condit last Thursday with less than a full dose of enthusiasm. Ms. Chung, I felt, lacked the killer instincts required for the task before her. I'd have preferred to see Condit face a more formidable inquisitor, say, a tag-team of Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter, the very thought of which would surely have the congressman whimpering in the corner and soiling his britches.

But Ms. Chung acquitted herself well, it seemed to me. No, Condit wasn't driven to suicide, as may have been the case had he faced O'Reilly and Coulter, but Chung very coolly allowed him to reveal to the world what a pathetic, spineless, little weasel he truly is. Between his various evasions, Condit did take pains to answer some of my more burning questions. For instance, I had been most anxious to know how long he had been married. The answer, as he told us four times, is 34 years. Did he ever have a cross word with Chandra? Never. Three times, never. And of course I, like most of America, had previously held the opinion that Mr. Condit was a perfect man. Well, imagine the jolt in the Dunphy house when he disabused me of that notion, very humbly admitting — five times — that he was not in fact a perfect man. Such frankness! You could hear the cries of disbelief from Salem to San Diego.

As galling as the little congressman may be — and he's plenty galling — Mr. Condit's maneuvers in the days and weeks following Chandra Levy's disappearance have achieved their obvious aim: to keep his keister out of the cooler. Yes, there is ever the pat answer parroted by his ever-shrinking circle of supporters: There is no evidence linking him to Chandra's disappearance. Well, one must ask, why then did he come off like a man who had Chandra's ear tucked away in his breast pocket?

Any defense attorney would scoff at the suggestion that the criminal-justice system is stacked in favor of the accused, but William Tucker, in a recent article in National Review ("The Post-Columbo Era," NR September 3, 2001), laments the restrictions that various Supreme Court decisions have placed on police officers, restrictions that often allow criminals to escape punishment. Gary Condit may be a beneficiary of these restrictions.

One of the points often debated in the Levy case is whether or not the D.C. police should have sought a warrant to search Condit's apartment in the early days of the investigation. Some of the talking heads have suggested there was sufficient probable cause to secure such a warrant. Others disagree. The difficulty for investigators, as Tucker describes, is that they were not allowed to draw an inference — not for the record, at least — from Condit's long silence and apparent contradictions on the matter. Thus, absent other evidence that might contribute to a judge's finding of probable cause, the police were precluded from relying on their commonsense reaction to Condit's obvious dissembling in his interviews. The cops could not go before a judge with an affidavit that would read, in effect, "The girl has disappeared, and the boyfriend is a lying little snake, so we'd like to go over and toss the guy's pad."

To those who find this disturbing I would recommend an addition to the summer reading list: Guilty: The Collapse of Criminal Justice, by Harold Rothwax. Rothwax, a judge on the New York State Supreme Court until his death in 1997, underwent something of a metamorphosis during his long legal career, entering the chrysalis as an idealistic champion of the accused and emerging as a law-and-order judge, one who saw the justice system's search for truth subverted by the expanding rights of criminals.

Chapter 4 of the book is entitled, "Clam Up and Call Your Lawyer," and it chronicles several cases in which obviously guilty defendants were freed when various courts found that their rights had not been properly respected. And we're not talking about jailhouse beatings and coerced confessions here. Joseph Skinner was convicted for the 1975 murder of a woman in Amherst, New York. Skinner had long been the focus of the investigation and had retained an attorney when detectives came to his home to serve him with an order to appear in a lineup. Sensing his agitation, the detectives advised Skinner of his Miranda rights, after which he made some damaging admissions. The New York Court of Appeals, in reversing Skinner's conviction, ruled that these admissions were improperly obtained, that Skinner's right to counsel was "indelible," and therefore could not be waived without his attorney being present. "'Indelible,'" writes Rothwax, "is one of those words that substitutes for thought. It suggests final, fundamental, unchangeable, not be questioned. It is not argument or analysis. It is fiat." The book is full of similarly unsettling accounts.

Among his suggestions for improving the system, Rothwax proposes that juries be allowed to draw an inference from a defendant's decision to remain silent. After all, everyone else with knowledge of the crime can be subpoenaed and compelled to testify on pain of imprisonment, yet the defendant himself can sit there and dummy up like a monk without fear of the consequences. Clam up if you like, writes Rothwax, but don't expect a reasonable person not to make something of it.

Rothwax's book is a compelling — if disquieting — read. Don't look for Gary Condit to be reading it on the flight back to Washington.

(*Jack Dunphy is the author's nom de cyber. The opinions expressed are his own and almost certainly do not reflect those of the LAPD management .)