Carlos DeLuna Wrongfully Executed
In my article How Many Wrongly Convicted Have Been Executed Since 1977?, I promised to post a detailed article for each of the poor souls who were wrongfully executed. Today we will cover Carlos DeLuna who was executed in Texas in 1989 for a crime he did not commit.
The case looks simple:
It was a cool 66 degrees in Corpus Christi, Texas the evening of Friday, February 4, 1983 when a Hispanic-looking man entered the Sigmor gas station on South Padre Island Drive and brutally murdered a 24-year-old female gas station attendant with a knife.
Thirty or so minutes later police found Carlos DeLuna, a parolee, just a few blocks away from the gas station underneath a parked truck lying in a puddle of water and, despite the cold weather, not wearing any shoes nor shirt.
Two eyewitnesses to the attack both said they saw the attacker wrestling with the clerk and identified Deluna who was sitting handcuffed in the back of the squad car as the killer.
De Luna was convicted and sentenced to death. Open and shut.
Well ... not quite so open and shut.
Consider the following crime scene (Click on image for larger, more grisly view):
Corpus Christi Police Department Photographs
Photo Credit: The Wrong Carlos
Lot of blood, eh? So a man struggling with a clerk should have at least one drop of blood on him or his clothes, wouldn't you say? Despite all you see above, not one speck of blood was ever found on Carlos DeLuna nor on his clothes nor on his shoes (both of which were found later the next day).
As for the key witness - he initially described a suspect that did not match DeLuna’s appearance but then changed his mind after seeing DeLuna in the back seat of the cop car.
In addition, Carlos told police he knew who the actual killer is and gave the name Carlos Hernandez. But the police had two eyewitnesses and that was enough for them. In addition, it's a better case with two non-criminals testifying against DeLuna rather than an ex-con testifying against Hernandez and so the prosecution chose not to disclose exculpatory evidence to the jury during the DeLuna trial. Yes, there was repeated prosecutorial misconduct (1), no blood evidence, no DNA (not yet available in 1983), the knife did not have DeLuna's fingerprints on them, an inappropriate identification procedure (2), and sloppy police work (3). But hey, it's Texas and that state doesn't care if it executes an innocent man.
For more detail, please look at The Wrong Carlos:
Based on one of the most thorough investigations of a criminal case in U.S. history, the groundbreaking book
by Columbia Law School Professor James Liebman and a team of his former students: Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White and Daniel Zharkovsky, uncovers evidence that Carlos DeLuna, a poor Hispanic man with childlike intelligence who was executed in Texas in 1989, was innocent.
All the evidence is here for readers to explore, and decide for themselves: crime-scene photos, law enforcement and court records, newspaper and TV coverage, police audiotape of the manhunt ending in DeLuna’s arrest, videotaped interviews, interactive map and much more. These sources represent the most complete set of primary records and witness interviews (many of them videotaped) that has ever been compiled on an American capital case or, we believe, on an American criminal case of any sort.
ENDNOTES
(1):
NY Times, 15 May 2012, A Routine Execution in Texas
In 2006, The Chicago Tribune presented evidence casting doubt on Mr. DeLuna’s conviction, based largely on Professor Liebman’s initial research. This account, based on new evidence and a 30-month inquiry, supports an even firmer conclusion that Texas executed an innocent man.
It shows grossly inadequate police work that missed critical evidence; unreliable evidence, like witnesses’ patently unfair identification of Mr. DeLuna as he was handcuffed in a police car; repeated prosecutorial misconduct, like failure to turn over exonerating evidence; and incompetent counsel, who did scant investigaton to find support for their client’s claim of innocence and put on no mitigating evidence at the penalty phase of the trial to avoid a death sentence.
(2):
Houston Chronicle, 15 May 2012, Eyewitness procedure flawed in DeLuna murder case, lawmakers say
Legislative sponsors of a law tightening procedures for police lineups on Tuesday faulted Corpus Christi police for allowing eyewitnesses in a 1983 convenience store robbery-murder to identify the suspect as he sat handcuffed in the back seat of a squad car.
State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, stopped short of claiming Texas wrongfully executed suspect Carlos DeLuna for the February 1983 murder of store clerk Wanda Lopez.
Gallego, however, said the way Corpus Christi police handled the suspect's identification was a "textbook example" of why the system needs to be reformed.
"What appears to be very faulty eyewitness identification was the main evidence used to reach a conviction in this case," Ellis said in an email.
(3):
Chicago Tribune, 25 Jun 2006, `I didn't do it. But I know who did'
But 16 years after De Luna died by lethal injection, the Tribune has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that the acquaintance he named, Carlos Hernandez, was the one who killed Lopez in 1983.
Ending years of silence, Hernandez's relatives and friends recounted how the violent felon repeatedly bragged that De Luna went to Death Row for a murder Hernandez committed.
The newspaper investigation, involving interviews with dozens of people and a review of thousands of pages of court records, shows the case was compromised by shaky eyewitness identification, sloppy police work and a failure to thoroughly pursue Hernandez as a possible suspect.
