Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man
Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man
Carlos DeLuna was put to death in December 1989 for a murder in Corpus Christi. But he didn't commit the crime. Today, his case reminds us of the glaring flaws of capital punishment.
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THE STORY
Like Possley and Mills in 2006, I don't have the space here to do justice to the facts of the DeLuna case. But I will try. Carlos DeLuna was executed in December 1989 for murdering Wanda Lopez in a February 1983 robbery in Corpus Christi. A jury convicted him in an afternoon of deliberation and sentenced him to death shortly thereafter. No appellate courts came to his rescue. And the six years it took from crime to execution was surprisingly -- suspiciously -- fast; nationwide, it's usually twice that long.
Texas convicted and executed DeLuna, all right, despite the fact that there was no blood or DNA evidence linking him to the scene of the crime. The state executed him despite the fact that the only eyewitness to the crime identified DeLuna while the suspect was sitting in the back of a police car parked in a dimly lit lot in front of the crime scene. Texas executed him despite the lack of DeLuna's fingerprints at the crime scene and the lack of the victim's hair and fibers on DeLuna. From a bloody scene, there was nothing.
Texas convicted and executed DeLuna despite the fact that the police and prosecutors knew or should have known that Lopez's real murderer was a man named Carlos Hernandez, a violent criminal who looked almost exactly like DeLuna. Why? Because Hernandez was known to use the sort of knife used as the murder weapon. Because he matched initial descriptions of the suspect. Because he was known to be violent toward women. Oh, and because he evidently couldn't stop bragging about how he had murdered Lopez and gotten someone else to take the fall for him.
"... [It] is no overstatement to call it 'common knowledge' in 1980s Corpus Christi that Carlos Gonzalez Hernandez killed Wanda Lopez," Liebman and Co. conclude. Yet Texas executed DeLuna despite the fact that key evidence in the case went missing both before and after trial; that DeLuna initially was appointed a lawyer without criminal law experience; and that law enforcement failed to provide the defense with exculpatory evidence. Any one of these factors might warrant a new trial. Taken together they portray appalling injustice.
THE BACKSTORY
Reading through the manuscript last weekend, jarred by what I was seeing, I began to jot down a list of things that went terribly wrong in the DeLuna case -- issues of fact, of evidence, of testimony, of motives, of incompetence, of indifference, of fraud, of morality, of integrity, of constitutionality -- that should have been raised and answered long before DeLuna was convicted, much less executed, back in the 1980s. I stopped when I got to 10. Here's the list.
1. There was no DNA or blood evidence on DeLuna despite bloody murder scene. There were no fingerprints. There was only one eyewitness and he was sketchy about what he had seen.
2. Police/prosecutors knew the whereabouts of another, more likely, suspect. But they didn't tell the defense this before or after the trial.
3. When the defendant identified the likely killer shortly before trial, the police and prosecutors did not reasonably follow up even though they knew that the man identified was capable of committing the crime.
4. Based upon early witness reports, the police at first sought another suspect. They did not share this information with the defense even though the two men (the two Carloses) looked eerily like one another.
5. The police officer collecting witness accounts relayed inaccurate and incomplete descriptions of suspects to the police dispatcher, who radioed them to officers in manhunt.
6. Police investigators botched the crime scene by turning it back to the store manager just two hours after the murder to be washed down and reopened immediately.
7. Evidence from the initial investigation was checked out by a prosecutor the day after the trial and was never returned. Any usuable DNA thus was lost.
8. The trial judge appointed a solo civil practitioner without any criminal trial experience much less any capital trial experience. The defense did not call a single "mitigating" witness in the sentencing phase of trial.
9. Police investigators did not measure a bloody footprint they photographed at the scene of the crime or test a cigarette butt they found on the floor of the store where the victim died.
10. A 9-11 dispatcher failed to quickly dispatch police to the scene of the crime, despite the fact that the victim had called for help. Later, the "manhunt tape" made by dispatchers was taped over and not turned over to the defense by the police.
Surely this epic malfeasance and misfeasance cannot be what Justice Scalia had in mind when he wrote in Marsh about capital cases getting "especially close scrutiny at every level." Indeed, as here, the opposite was true. The DeLuna case was flawed at virtually every level. And all it would have taken to do justice would have been for one prosecutor or cop, one judge or witness, to step up and tell the truth. That didn't happen. And when it did, thanks to Liebman, Mills and Possley, it was too late for Carlos DeLuna.
What do I think happened? All of the things that go wrong every day in capital cases in this country, all of the human failings and official, institutional biases and prejudices and self-justifications and self-delusions that turn Justice Scalia's Marsh concurrence into a farce. The bottom line? The criminal justice system decided, combustibly, that Carlos DeLuna was bad enough to be executed without a remotely fair process. The community was fine with the result. The media didn't care. And the rule of law "covered" it all.
THE EXPERTS
The answer to Los Tocayos Carlos, if there can be one, is that the case is so old its failings are now outdated and irrelevant. The district attorney lobbyists will argue that capital cases, in Texas and elsewhere, are handled much more professionally today than they were 30 years ago. And because both of the Carloses are now long dead, there isn't much of a media hook here, either. Posthumous exonerations don't give the cameras the just-out-of-prison "walk shot" television producers love.
But it would be a shame if we were to view the DeLuna case through the prism of legal history. There is nothing ancient about the lessons it teaches. DeLuna may be gone. But the problems his case represents still are here, in virtually every jurisdiction that still imposes capital punishment. So last week I asked some of the most prominent death penalty experts in the country to look at my DeLuna "list" and then identify pending cases that were similarly marked with such obvious reasonable doubts.
I asked Richard Dieter, at the Death Penalty Information Center, and Barry Scheck, co-director of the Innocence Project. I reached out to professors like Eric Freedman, Sean O'Brien and Bennett Gershman, to practitioners like George Kendall, and to earnest other lawyers who handle capital cases from more of a ground-level view. They all agreed that today in America there are plenty of more recent cases where these sorts of issues have arisen or could arise.
Yes, America, We Have Executed an Innocent Man - Andrew Cohen - National - The Atlantic
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To view the article in it's entirety click the link above. I still remain "conflicted" when it comes to the DP and at times,I've supported both sides of the argument for and against. Every time that I've convinced myself that the DP is completely justifiable, a story like this pops up and my doubts return.
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05-16-2012, 09:15 AM
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