That's the title of an editorial in today's New York Times concerning the case of Carlos DeLuna. It begins today's extensive coverage of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review (HRLR) article, Los Tocayos Carlos,
Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in 1989 by the state of Texas, was almost certainly wrongly convicted of stabbing a young woman to death with a knife in a gas station robbery in Corpus Christi. Carlos Hernandez, who died in a Texas prison while serving time for stabbing someone else, almost certainly killed the young woman and repeatedly told others that he had committed the murder.
This case is the subject of an extraordinary project at Columbia Law School, which this week released a book-length account — called “Los Tocayos Carlos,” or the namesake Carlos — detailing the errors in the investigation and prosecution of Mr. DeLuna from the moment of his arrest.
Texas has executed 482 people since it reinstated the death penalty in 1982, four times the number of any other state. A grievous injustice was very likely done in the DeLuna case. But the errors documented by Prof. James Liebman and his team are routinely found in other capital cases in Texas and other states.
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.
Earlier coverage of the Carlos DeLuna case and the HRLR article begins at the link. Additional news coverage will be linked in the next post.
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