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Thread: Carlos De Luna - Texas Execution - December 7, 1989

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    Carlos De Luna - Texas Execution - December 7, 1989


    Wanda Jean Lopez




    Summary of Offense: Convicted for the 1983 robbery and stabbing death of Wanda Jean Lopez, a 24-year-old convenience store clerk in Corpus Christi.

    Victim: Carla Jean Lopez

    Time of Death: 12:24 a.m.

    Manner of Execution: Lethal Injection

    Last Meal: Declined last meal

    Final Statement: "I want to say I hold no grudges. I hate no one. I love my family. Tell everyone on death row to keep the faith and don’t give up."

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    Executed murderer asked forgiveness, chaplain says

    HUNTSVILLE - One of Carlos DeLuna's last acts before being executed was to ask a prison chaplain to mail a letter to one of his victims seeking forgiveness.

    As condemned inmates are prepared to meet their fate, they are encouraged to make peace with those they might harbor bitterness toward, said the Rev. Carroll Pickett, the chaplain who held DeLuna's hand as prison officials strapped him to the gurney and inserted the needle, which carried the fatal solution, into his arm.

    The 27-year-old former electrician - who started his life of crime as a juvenile stealing autos, drinking and sniffing paint fumes - died at 12:24 a.m. Thursday for the 1983 robbery and stabbing death of Wanda Jean Lopez, a 24-year-old convenience store clerk in Corpus Christi.

    "I'm glad it's finally over," Mary Vargas, Lopez's mother, said when she was notified DeLuna had died.

    Pickett acknowledged that DeLuna had asked him to mail a letter to someone the convict believed had not forgiven him. It was not sent to Lopez's parents, Pickett said. He declined to specify to whom the letter was addressed, other than to say it was not sent to anyone involved in the case for which he was executed.

    DeLuna, Pickett said, was scared and had asked the minister to maintain physical contact with him while he died. So Pickett stood there, with his right hand lightly resting on the condemned man's lower right leg as the lethal injection was administered.

    "He was very much afraid," Pickett said. "He was not afraid of dying; he was afraid of the unknown." DeLuna raised his head off the gurney twice to look at Pickett before giving his final statement in the death chamber at the Huntsville "Walls" Unit.

    "I want to say that I don't hold any grudges," the inmate said. "I don't hate anyone. I want to let my family know I love them and I want to tell my friends on death row to keep the faith up, to hang in there. Everything is going to be all right."

    The youngest of nine children, DeLuna had asked four of his siblings and a friend to witness his execution. But after they visited with him on his final day, Pickett said, his sisters and half-brother decided they could not handle watching him die.

    DeLuna became the fourth Texas prisoner to die this year and the 33rd since executions were resumed in 1982 after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his plea for a stay and Gov. Bill Clements refused to grant a reprieve Wednesday afternoon.

    His execution could have been avoided, though, had DeLuna, accepted prosecutor Steve Schiwetz's offer of a life sentence in exchange for a guilty plea. Schiwetz, who now is in private practice in Corpus Christi, said he did not recall until Thursday that he had offered the then 21-year-old a plea bargain.

    DeLuna's criminal record began in 1978, when he was 16 and was arrested for public intoxication. Court records show that he was arrested six times that year on charges that included burglary, paint sniffing, auto theft and running away.

    By his 18th birthday, he had been arrested six more times, mostly on public intoxication charges. He served his first prison sentence in 1980 after being convicted of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle and attempted rape of a Dallas woman.

    He was on parole just two days from that sentence when his parole was revoked after he attempted to rape the mother of one of his prison pals. He had been on parole about six weeks before being arrested for Lopez's death.

    "I just ran with the wrong crowd," DeLuna said of his troubles with the law. He described himself as the black sheep of his family.

    DeLuna's history of alcohol and substance abuse as a teen-ager was one of three issues that his attorney, Chris Weaver of Dallas, had raised in appeals, hoping to win a stay on the basis that jurors should have been instructed that such factors were evidence that mitigated against imposition of the death sentence.

    But that evidence was never presented at his trial, a move that the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in denying a stay, said must have been a tactical decision on the part of his trial attorneys. Had his trial attorneys presented evidence of his alcohol and drug abuse, the state could have introduced evidence of DeLuna's criminal history.

    "I find it hard to understand how any lawyer in a capital case could fail to investigate and present any mitigating evidence ... where that is the only thing that could save a person's life," Weaver said.

    State attorneys, however, said that even if such evidence had been introduced, it would not have shown that DeLuna's ability to decide right from wrong had been impaired by his drinking and paint sniffing.

    Attorney General Jim Mattox said the execution is likely to be the last one in Texas until after the U.S. Supreme Court decides how broadly to apply its ruling in the case of Johnny Paul Penry, a 33-year-old retarded inmate convicted of the 1979 rape-slaying of Livingston homemaker Pamela Moseley Carpenter.

    When the court overturned Penry's conviction last summer, it said jurors should have been told that his history of severe child abuse and mental retardation could be sufficient evidence to impose a life sentence rather than the death penalty.

    In the case of John Henry Selvage, 39, convicted of slaying an off-duty Harris County sheriff's deputy, Albert Garza, during a 1979 jewelry store heist, the court will determine whether he had good cause not to raise evidence of his mental impairment at his trial and whether there would be a "fundamental miscarriage of justice" if he were prevented from bring it up now. Arguments in that case are set for Jan. 17.

    http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/ar...id=1989_669133

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    Carlos De Luna (left) and Carlos Hernandez


    Carlos De Luna Execution: Texas Put To Death An Innocent Man, Columbia University Team Says

    One of the strongest arguments against the death penalty is the frightening chance of executing an innocent person. Columbia University law professor James Liebman said he and a team of students have proven that Texas gave a lethal injection to the wrong man.

    Carlos De Luna was executed in 1989 for stabbing to death a gas station clerk in Corpus Christi six years earlier. It was a ghastly crime. The trial attracted local attention, but not from concern that a guiltless man would be punished while the killer went free.

    De Luna, an eighth grade dropout, maintained that he was innocent from the moment cops put him in the back seat of a patrol car until the day he died. Today, 29 years after De Luna was arrested, Liebman and his team published a mammoth report in the Human Rights Law Review that concludes De Luna paid with his life for a crime he likely did not commit. Shoddy police work, the prosecution's failure to pursue another suspect, and a weak defense combined to send De Luna to death row, they argued.

    "I would say that across the board, there was nonchalance," Liebman told The Huffington Post. "It looked like a common case, but we found that there was a very serious claim of innocence."

    Police and prosecutors treated the killing of Wanda Lopez at the Sigmor Shamrock gas station on February 4, 1983, like a robbery gone bad. A recording of the chilling 911 call from Lopez, a 24-year-old single mom working the night shift, captured her screaming and begging her killer for mercy.

    De Luna, then 20, was found hiding under a pickup truck a few blocks from the gory crime scene. A wad of rolled-up bills totaling $149 was in his pocket.

    Eyewitness testimony formed the bedrock of the case against him. Now, that testimony is perhaps most contested aspect of his conviction.

    Cops brought De Luna back to the Shamrock. A customer filling his tank before the murder told police that De Luna was the man he saw putting a knife in his pocket outside the store. Another customer who rushed to the store's entrance when he heard Lopez struggling identified De Luna as the man who emerged. A married couple saw a man running a few blocks away and later identified De Luna in police photos shown to them.

    With De Luna's record of numerous arrests for burglary and public drunkenness, plus a conviction for attempted rape and auto theft, it seemed like police had found the perp. But Liebman said De Luna took the fall in a case of mistaken identity.

    Among the key findings in the Columbia team's report:


    • The eyewitness statements actually conflict with each other. What witnesses said about the appearance and location of the suspect suggest that they were describing more than one person.
    • Photos of a bloody footprint and blood spatter on the walls suggest the killer would have had blood on his shoes and pant legs, yet De Luna's clothes were clean.
    • Prosecutors and police ignored tips unearthed in the case files that Carlos Hernandez, an older friend of De Luna, who had a reputation for wielding a blade, had killed Lopez. The defense failed to track down Hernandez, who bore a striking resemblance to De Luna.


    "If a new trial was somehow able to be conducted today, a jury would acquit De Luna" said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, who read a draft of Liebman's report. "We don't have a perfect case where can agree that we have an innocent person who's been executed, but by weight of this investigation, I think we can say this is as close as a person is going to come."

    In 1983 and during the appeals process, officials handling De Luna's case saw the opposite -- a slam-dunk conviction. The prosecution and the court-appointed defense lawyer didn't put much stock in De Luna's claim that Hernandez plunged a knife into Lopez's chest. Record-keeping was so lax there's no clear evidence the gas station was robbed during the slaying, Liebman said.

    In trying to clear his name, De Luna didn't help himself. For months after his arrest, he refused to reveal the name of the real killer, because he feared Hernandez. His credibility plummeted when other parts of his alibi for the night of the murder were disproven by the prosecutor.

    The fateful night began, according to De Luna, when he went to a skating rink, where he met Hernandez and two sisters. De Luna admitted that he was near the gas station later, but said he was across the street in a bar. While he nursed his drink, Hernandez bought cigarettes in the Shamrock. He said he emerged from the bar to see Hernandez fighting with Lopez. Hearing police sirens, he said he fled, because he didn't want to get into trouble.

    The prosecution, however, discredited De Luna's version of events. One of the sisters who was allegedly with him at the rink testified that she was at her baby shower that night.

    "I had blown his alibi to bits," said Steve Schiwetz, one of the prosecutors.

    A guilty verdict was reached with little delay. The capital murder trial lasted six days in July 1983.

    "I'm open to the argument that somebody named Carlos Hernandez really did it," said Schiwetz, "but everything I know confirms the original impression that De Luna did it."

    The apparent random targeting of Lopez wasn't Hernandez's style, Schiwetz said. Hernandez's tendency was to unleash violence on the his girlfriends and wife, not strangers, he said. In 1986, Hernandez was accused of murdering another woman with a knife, but the case was dismissed.

    Several of Hernandez' family members interviewed for the Columbia University report said pictures of the murder weapon found at the gas station looked like the knife Hernandez habitually kept with him. In all of De Luna's numerous arrests, police never found him carrying a blade, according to the Columbia report.

    The relatives' portrait of Hernandez's disheveled appearance gelled with a description of the suspect seen fleeing the convenience store. Witness Kevan Baker said the killer looked like a "derelict," wearing a flannel jacket and gray sweatshirt. Hernandez's relatives said he often wore a flannel coat. De Luna was fastidious with his appearance and always wore black slacks and dress shirts, the report said.

    Liebman sought more scientific proof. Fingerprints taken from the knife and cigarette pack found at the crime scene were sent to a former Scotland Yard investigator for comparison with Hernandez's prints. But the evidence had been so poorly collected by police, Liebman said, that the results were inconclusive.

    The Columbia University team's report, more than 400 pages long, also is a biography of the central players, emphasizing the troubled upbringings and hard-drinking adulthoods of De Luna and Hernandez.

    Liebman learned about De Luna roughly 10 years ago, when he began examining convictions in which a single eyewitness testified. As he and a student delved into the files, they became convinced De Luna wasn't guilty.

    They turned over their findings to the Chicago Tribune which published a three-part series in 2006 that found evidence suggesting Hernandez killed Lopez. Multiple people told the Tribune that Hernandez -- who died in 1999 in prison from cirrhosis of the liver -- had confessed to killing her.

    Revisiting questions about Lopez's death would be too painful, her nephews said.

    "That's something our family has had to deal with," Louis Vargas told The Huffington Post. "We've had closure with it and we don't want to reopen it. We believe the justice system did what it had to do."

    One of De Luna's attorneys, James Lawrence, told HuffPost he doesn't count him among the clients who've been wrongfully accused of capital crimes.

    "The fact that he wouldn't help us and this was his life on the line -- that's the one thing that kept bothering the living daylights out of me," Lawrence said.

    Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, there have been 1,295 executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Texas leads with 482 executions.

    The ease with which De Luna was prosecuted and the obscurity of his death are what makes his case so important, said Liebman.

    "There are many cases out there that nobody has ever looked at and are probably at risk of innocence," said Liebman. "It's a cautionary tale about the risks we take when we have the death penalty."

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...n_1507003.html
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    Senior Member Frequent Poster PATRICK5's Avatar
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    How many times can they dig this guy up and declare him innocent?
    Obama ate my dad

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    Here is a good answer,PATRICK5: enough times to prove what they (and I also) believe to be true: an innocent man died for a murder he never committed. Coincidentally,mistaken identity was also mentioned in the Troy Davis case at one point,as I heard...

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    Administrator Michael's Avatar
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    Ahh. now I understand. You think if a lie is written often enough it becomes a truth? Wo are you and Liebmann to tell other people that they had been wrong. I think in a normal state there are courts to decide what´s write and wrong.

    It seems that the antis need a new poster boy after the last one failed the after-execution-DNA test. :barber:
    No murder can be so cruel that there are not still useful imbeciles who do gloss over the murderer and apologize.

  7. #7
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    I didn't find the Huffington Post's article convincing.
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  8. #8
    Derek
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    Wrong man was executed in Texas, probe says

    He was the spitting image of the killer, had the same first name and was near the scene of the crime at the fateful hour: Carlos DeLuna paid the ultimate price and was executed in place of someone else in Texas in 1989, a report out Tuesday found.

    Even "all the relatives of both Carloses mistook them," and DeLuna was sentenced to death and executed based only on eyewitness accounts despite a range of signs he was not a guilty man, said law professor James Liebman.

    Liebman and five of his students at Columbia School of Law spent almost five years poring over details of a case that he says is "emblematic" of legal system failure.

    DeLuna, 27, was put to death after "a very incomplete investigation. No question that the investigation is a failure," Liebman said.
    The report's authors found "numerous missteps, missed clues and missed opportunities that let authorities prosecute Carlos DeLuna for the crime of murder, despite evidence not only that he did not commit the crime but that another individual, Carlos Hernandez, did," the 780-page investigation found.

    The report, entitled "Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution," traces the facts surrounding the February 1983 murder of Wanda Lopez, a single mother who was stabbed in the gas station where she worked in a quiet corner of the Texas coastal city of Corpus Christi.

    "Everything went wrong in this case," Liebman said.

    That night Lopez called police for help twice to protect her from an individual with a switchblade.

    "They could have saved her, they said 'we made this arrest immediately' to overcome the embarrassment," Liebman said.

    Forty minutes after the crime Carlos DeLuna was arrested not far from the gas station.

    He was identified by only one eyewitness who saw a Hispanic male running from the gas station. But DeLuna had just shaved and was wearing a white dress shirt -- unlike the killer, who an eyewitness said had a mustache and was wearing a grey flannel shirt.

    Even though witnesses accounts were contradictory -- the killer was seen fleeing towards the north, while DeLuna was caught in the east -- DeLuna was arrested.

    "I didn't do it, but I know who did," DeLuna said at the time, saying that he saw Carlos Hernandez entering the service station.
    DeLuna said he ran from police because he was on parole and had been drinking.

    Hernandez, known for using a blade in his attacks, was later jailed for murdering a woman with the same knife. But in the trial, the lead prosecutor told the jury that Hernandez was nothing but a "phantom" of DeLuna's imagination.

    DeLuna's budget attorney even said that it was probable that Carlos Hernandez never existed.

    However in 1986 a local newspaper published a photograph of Hernandez in an article on the DeLuna case, Liebman said.

    Following hasty trial DeLuna was executed by lethal injection in 1989.

    Up to the day he died in prison of cirrhosis of the liver, Hernandez repeatedly admitted to murdering Wanda Lopez, Liebman said.

    "Unfortunately, the flaws in the system that wrongfully convicted and executed DeLuna -- faulty eyewitness testimony, shoddy legal representation and prosecutorial misconduct -- continue to send innocent men to their death today," read a statement that accompanies the report.

    http://ca.news.yahoo.com/wrong-man-e...051125159.html

  9. #9
    Senior Member Frequent Poster PATRICK5's Avatar
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    Every couple of years, they dig that old case up. He was guilty.

    The defense gets to hire an put on experts regarding the problems with eye witness identification. They get to cross examine the hell out of the eye wits. The judge gives special instructions on eye wit testimony and cautions the jury. The appellate courts also review eye witness cases carefully.

    However, having been an eyewitness myself on two occasions, I had no doubts and each person I identified was guilty. The abolish crowd wants people to believe that no eyewitness identification is believable. That's pure BS.
    Last edited by PATRICK5; 05-17-2012 at 08:30 AM.
    Obama ate my dad

  10. #10
    Derek
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    Quote Originally Posted by Michael View Post
    Ahh. now I understand. You think if a lie is written often enough it becomes a truth? Wo are you and Liebmann to tell other people that they had been wrong. I think in a normal state there are courts to decide what´s write and wrong.

    It seems that the antis need a new poster boy after the last one failed the after-execution-DNA test. :barber:
    The legal system is not perfect, that happening however would be impossible so I'm not promoting perfect evidence as the only appropriate justification to sentence someone to death. If you ever watch the A&E show "The First 48", a typical way to identify an alleged murderer, is to show an eyewitness a photo lineup of their person of interest/suspect with five other similar-looking people. The sole eyewitness in this case identified him based on the fact that he was a hispanic male.

    I presume the last "poster boy" you're talking about is Beunka Adams? Let me make it clear, I determine my opinion on innocence or guilt on a case-by-case basis. I'm not one of those "antis" that gives this forum such flack so don't group me with them, nor did I disagree with Adams's guilt. Besides, last time I checked, you are allowed to write up a report stating your stance/opinion on an issue. The Texas judicial system, the American public and anyone else who reacts in some way to this can respond as they see fit. Let me ask, if a law professor wrote up a report on why he/she thinks that a suspect who was found not guilty but evidence leads him/her to believe that the same suspect committed that offense, would you have an issue with that?

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