Today's San Antonio Express-News carries the editorial, "DeLuna case shows flaws in system."
Many people assume that the more serious the criminal case is, the more meticulously it is investigated and prosecuted. If the state is going to send someone to prison for life or to the death chamber, it's often believed, the case against him must be rock solid.
As the increasing number of DNA exonerations demonstrates, that's not always so. According to the Innocence Project, 289 people have been exonerated of serious crimes in the United States on the basis of DNA evidence since 1989. Texas leads the nation with 44 such exonerations.
One involved Michael Blair, who served 14 years on death row before he was exonerated in 2008. The most recent involves Michael Morton, who served 25 years of a life sentence for the murder of his wife, while the actual murderer was free and went on — authorities believe — to commit a second murder.
Now an investigation by the Columbia Human Rights Law Review presents a compelling argument that the state of Texas put the wrong man to death in 1989 when it executed Carlos DeLuna for the murder of Corpus Christi convenience store clerk Wanda Lopez. The DeLuna case joins those of Cameron Willingham, Claude Jones and Ruben Cantu in offering strong evidence that deeply flawed death penalty cases get through the criminal justice system, with all its checks and balances and all its avenues of appeal.
And:
But if Texas is going to reserve the right to exact the ultimate sanction, the state's criminal justice system will have to do a better job of ensuring that those who end up on death row are actually guilty of their crimes.
Houston Chronicle columnist Patricia Kilday Hart writes, "Can't count on eyewitnesses to ID criminals."
"Why do journalists care so much about criminals?" That was the simple question posed in an email I recently found in my inbox. The author didn't tell me the grounds for her premise, but it arrived right after a column I had written about providing lawyers for poor people accused of crimes. I thought about the email this week after reading Chronicle reporter Allan Turner's story about Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas for a 1983 robbery-murder in Corpus Christi that he almost certainly did not commit.
And:
During the last session of the Texas Legislature, a bill by Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, was passed into law requiring the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas at Sam Houston State University to adopt a model policy for police lineups, to reduce the possibility of injecting error into the process.
The bill was recommended by the Timothy Cole Innocence Commission, named for a Texas Tech University student who was convicted of a rape he did not commit and died in prison of an asthma attack before he was exonerated by DNA evidence. The rape victim in the case was shown Cole's picture repeatedly until she selected it, and a police officer congratulated her for her selection.
Earlier this year, LEMIT finalized its model policy. Among the recommendations: Eyewitnesses should be shown suspects' photos one at a time, instead of all together. That, the experts say, reduces subconscious pressure to select a person who looks most like the criminal. Each suspect stands alone.
That's not how the Houston Police Department currently conducts photo lineups. According to a 2009 policy, photo spreads are shown to witnesses.
When LEMIT took testimony regarding its recommendations, Houston police Detective Mark Holloway argued there wasn't enough research to abandon photo spreads in favor of showing the photos sequentially (one-at-a-time) to witnesses.
But a prestigious think tank, the American Judicature Society, says otherwise. In a recent survey of research, the AJS concluded that "decades of laboratory research" show that the "sequential procedure reduces mistaken identifications with little or no reduction in accurate identifications."
Earlier coverage of Carlos DeLuna and the Columbia HRLR investigation begins at the link. All coverage is in the Carlos DeLuna category index.
Comments