Book Review - The Wrong Carlos by James S. Liebman and the Columbia DeLuna Project
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia declared in 2006 that there has not been “a single case — not one — in which it is clear that a person was executed for a crime he did not commit. If such an event had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.” His honor better listen up. A law professor and others have found Carlos DeLuna, “The Wrong Carlos.”
On a February evening in 1983, Wanda Lopez’s killer stabbed her to death while she was on the phone with a police dispatcher, pleading for help. As the murderer left the convenience store where Wanda worked, he rushed by an eyewitness. Other witnesses saw two men running in different directions in the Corpus Christi neighborhood. One was Carlos DeLuna, arrested when police found him hiding behind a truck a few blocks away. He told the arresting officer he had not killed the clerk but knew who did. On the eve of trial five months later, he told his lawyers it was Carlos Hernandez, a chronic and violent criminal well-known to Carlos DeLuna, to many in the community and to the police. Nevertheless, five months later a jury convicted DeLuna after a short trial and the next day sentenced him to die. Texas executed him in December 1989.
Professor James Leibman happened upon the DeLuna case in 2004 while reviewing capital cases that relied on eyewitness identification. A decade later he and five former Columbia Law School students published this exhaustive study of the circumstances leading to the conviction and execution of an innocent man. The lists of people their private investigators interviewed, the transcripts they read, the recorded interviews they reviewed and the video interviews they watched extend for 40 pages. Their thorough approach leaves little doubt that Texas put the wrong person to death.
Intellectually limited, Carlos DeLuna left school in the eighth grade. He became a small-time criminal who drank, sniffed glue, was frequently arrested and spent time in juvenile detention and, later, prison. None of his crimes involved a weapon, and he never had a weapon when booked into jail.
At trial he was a victim of injustice in too many ways to count. The detective in charge of the case was new to homicides and did a miserable job of securing and processing the crime scene. Police did not take the murder weapon into evidence, nor did they test the blood or other items at the scene for possible evidence of the killer. A senior homicide detective, who was on the Corpus Christi police force at the time but not involved in the case, provides a fascinating, detailed critique.
The two appointed lawyers at trial were incompetent or lazy. They scarcely cross-examined witnesses. They made no effort to locate “the other Carlos” and offered no evidence at all at the sentencing phase. (It is customary during sentencing to introduce testimony of family members and others in support of sparing the defendant’s life.) Most of the lawyers on appeal, some of them paid by Carlos’s sister, were no more conscientious, including, ironically, those who argued that counsel-at-trial were incompetent. Only for his last, most hopeless appeal did DeLuna have an able, hard-working lawyer.
Contrary to law and ethics, the prosecutor failed to provide the defense with the portion of the dispatcher’s recording in which witnesses describe two different men running in the area around the time of the murders. He also argued to the jury that Carlos Hernandez, whom the defendant named as the real killer, was a “phantom” of DeLuna’s imagination; in fact, Hernandez had been arrested numerous times, usually in possession of the type of knife that killed Wanda Lopez. By the time DeLuna was executed, Hernandez had bragged to several people that he, not his “tocayo,” or namesake, murdered Lopez.
The most remarkable thing is the resemblance between the two men. When Professor Leibman’s investigators showed their booking photos to family members, numerous people identified the wrong man as their relative. Such misidentification would certainly have been useful to a zealous and competent defense counsel.
Using statistical methods, Samuel Gross of University of Michigan Law School recently issued a study concluding that 4.1 percent of all people on death row would be exonerated if they lived long enough. He states that 340 people have been wrongly executed in the United States since 1973. Other sources report that a total of 143 people on death row have been cleared.
Based on another kind of evidence, Professor Leibman and his students have provided an important and very personal example of how a specific combination of circumstances can result in the conviction and execution of the wrong person. Much of the American public — like Justice Scalia — would like to think this does not and cannot happen. The exhaustive and detailed nature of “The Wrong Carlos” proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the wrong man died for Wanda Lopez’s murder. It requires no stretch of the imagination to conclude there must be others who have been victimized the same way.
Book Review - The Wrong Carlos by James S. Liebman and the Columbia DeLuna Project