Report: Texas Executed Innocent Man


Carlos DeLuna maintained his innocence from the moment he was arrested
in 1983 for the stabbing death of a young Texas woman right up until he
was executed six years later. On Monday, a Columbia University professor
and a group of law students offered what appears to be definitive proof
that DeLuna's mistaken-identity claims were the real deal and that an
innocent man was put to death.

The Guardian explains how DeLuna, a 20-year-old eighth-grade dropout at
the time of his arrest, told authorities that not only was he not Wanda
Lopez's killer, but that he knew the man who was: Carlos Hernandez, a
notorious criminal who shared Deluna's first name and looked so much
like him that the two were frequently mistaken for twins. The
prosecution, however, successfully argued that they searched for this
elusive Hernandez without success, and that DeLuna had simply made him up.

But in the spring edition of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review,
professor James Liebman recounts how he was able to track down Hernandez
with little effort. Four years after DeLuna was put to death, Liebman
hired a private investigator to see if he could find any evidence of
Hernandez. Within hours, the investigator found a woman who knew
Hernandez's date of birth, which proved not only Hernandez’s existence
but helped unlock his criminal record that showed he had a record of
abusing women.

Among the many damning findings, Liebman, with the help of 12 students,
discovered that Hernandez had made numerous confessions to killing
Lopez, and that forensic teams had failed to take the most basic
measures in investigating the crime scene. Meanwhile, Deluna's death row
sentence was largely based on the eyewitness account of one man, who, as
the Guardian reports, admitted in an interview 20 years after the crime
that he's not that sure whom he saw flee the scene.

"This case changed my whole view," Liebman told the Houston Chronicle.
"I had thought the problem cases were ones where you have an out-of-town
defendant, a scary person who commits a really bad crime that grabs the
whole community. ... Now, I think the worst cases are those that likely
happen every day in which no one cares that much about the defendant or
the victim."

Over at The Atlantic, Andrew Cohen explains that the report severely
undercuts Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's claim that it it highly
unlikely that the an innocent man has ever been put to death in the
United States by capital punishment in modern times.

Here's Scalia's pull-quote:

"It should be noted at the outset that the dissent does not discuss
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 by the abolition lobby."

For more, check out the full Columbia report, "Los Tocayos Carlos: An
Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution."

http://www3.law.columbia.edu/hrlr/ltc/