The Wrong Carlos

April 7, 2014
Columbia University law professor Liebman and five now-graduated students of the Columbia Law School stumbled upon an atrociously handled capital murder case in which a young Hispanic man, Carlos DeLuna, was wrongfully convicted for the murder of Wanda Lopez. The Carlos DeLuna project expands on the “abject failure of the Texas criminal justice system” in this infuriating yet engrossing book on wrongful conviction. Convenience store clerk Wanda Lopez was warned of a man carrying a knife loitering near her store. She called the police—once to tell them of the man, and a second time when he was already in the store. Recorded on that second phone call are her last words. Nearby, DeLuna is found hiding under a truck, and what follows is both tragic and shocking. Liebman details the police and courtroom procedures after DeLuna’s arrest and describes how police incompetence, corrupt and inefficient lawyers, and sheer bad luck place the wrong man in jail, letting the true murderer, Carlos Hernandez, off the hook to commit more acts of violence. Liebman details the fallibility of eye-witness accounts alongside the injustice of death penalty sentencing, and the examples of racism, contempt for the poor, and police inaction mark this as an important critique of our legal system.

Starred review from June 1, 2014
A Columbia Law School professor and some of his students gather and present evidence establishing the innocence of Carlos DeLuna, executed for murder in Texas in 1989.Legal scholar Liebman (co-author: Federal Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure, 2001) begins (and ends) with Justice Antonin Scalia, who famously said in 2006 that there has not been a single case of wrongful execution. Perhaps this one will change his message? The author acquired the old transcripts, interviewed many of those involved, read the newspaper clippings and watched the TV news coverage-in general, he and his team behaved as the authorities in Corpus Christi should have but manifestly didn't. In 1983, DeLuna was accused of stabbing Wanda Lopez, a gas station clerk, and was apprehended less than an hour later. Intellectually damaged, DeLuna denied the crime from the beginning to the very moment of his execution. Liebman and the others discovered that there was another Carlos-Carlos Hernandez-who was patently guilty. He and DeLuna looked a lot alike, but the violent Hernandez, a career criminal who later died in prison, carried (and often used) a knife and later told more than one person that he had actually committed the murder. Liebman's team went over the physical evidence thoroughly (there was none connecting DeLuna to the case) and tacitly and explicitly accuse the Corpus Christi authorities of a rush to judgment. The author offers numerous photographs, charts and other documents (some are from police reports and trial evidence), as well as a website that presents much more of it. The chapter about DeLuna's execution is wrenching. Liebman concludes with thoughts about how something like this could happen-and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.Death penalty opponents now have a definitive example to cite; death penalty proponents have an agonizing case to consider.

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June 15, 2014

Liebman (Columbia Law Sch.) and his former students present the chilling results of the Columbia DeLuna Project, which sought to prove that Texas executed an innocent man in 1989. Unlike Leslie Lytle's Execution's Doorstep, which studied death-row inmates who were freed after being exonerated, this is a postmortem investigation of a collection of travesties. According to the authors, the 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez, a convenience store clerk in Corpus Christi, TX, was committed by Carlos Hernandez, whom Carlos DeLuna, the executed man, knew. Using court records, extensive interviews with witnesses, and photographic evidence, the authors dissect DeLuna's conviction, which was based on a single eyewitness and on DeLuna's capture near the crime scene. The book attempts to refute Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia's 2006 claim that there has never been proof of a wrongful U.S. execution. The exhaustively documented text presents the case in chronological order, from the crime to the execution, and at a minimum creates abundant reasonable doubt for the accused. The authors do not argue for the abolition of the death penalty but show that in one case the justice system completely failed. One question left unanswered is whether, 25 years later, death penalty prosecutions are any more thorough. VERDICT A masterpiece of its type and a disturbing true crime account, highly recommended for all nonfiction collections.--Harry Charles, St. Louis

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