James S. Liebman - The Wrong Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution

THE WRONG CARLOS

The Wrong Carlos

ANATOMY OF A WRONGFUL EXECUTION

James S. Liebman
Shawn Crowley
Andrew Markquart
Lauren Rosenberg
Lauren Gallo White
Daniel Zharkovsky

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Copyright 2014 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53668-4

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The wrong Carlos : anatomy of a wrongful execution / James S. Liebman, Shawn Crowley,
Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White, and Daniel Zharkovsky.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16722-2 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-16723-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-231-53668-4 (e-book)

1. DeLuna, CarlosTrials, litigation, etc. 2. Vargas Lpez, Wanda. 3. Trials (Murder)Texas. 4. Capital punishmentTexas. 5. Judicial errorTexas. I. Liebman, James S., author.

KF224.D45W76 2014

364.152'3092dc23

2013044147

A Columbia University Press E-book.
CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at .

COVER IMAGES : Courtesy of the author

COVER DESIGN : Marc Cohen

An earlier version of this work was published as Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution, 43 Colum. Hum. Rts. L. Rev. 711 (2012).

All rights reserved. 2013.

References to Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the authors nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK IS SUPPORTED BY A GRANT FROM

FIGURE FOUNDATION.

CONTENTS

EXECUTION OF THE INNOCENT is the American criminal justice systems worst nightmare. But is it real? No less an authority than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia doesnt think so. In 2006, he proclaimed that there has not been a single casenot onein 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 innocents name would be shouted from the rooftops.

This book is about two men named Carlos who lived in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Carlos DeLuna was executed on December 7, 1989. Carlos Hernandez died in a Texas prison a decade later. Through their stories and that of a young convenience store clerk named Wanda Lopez, the book offers readers the chance to make up their own minds about the reality of wrongful executions and to decide for themselves whether there is anything about the events described here that is worth shouting from the rooftops.

In the , we offer our own thoughts about what happened and what it means for the American criminal justice system. In the meantime, we do our best to stay out of readers way as they make up their own minds. Toward that end, we lay out the facts as fully as we can based on an intensive investigation begun in 2004, and we use a no-frills narrative to make the facts as accessible as possible to as wide an audience as we can reach. The less said here, the better.

Supplementing the book is a Web site ( with our reflections on the case, we offer the following guides and resources. Some of these materials are available in the book; others are on the Web site.

MAPS AND VIDEOTAPES SHOWING KEY LOCATIONS OF IMPORTANT EVENTS IN CORPUS CHRISTI

in Corpus Christi (in prologue)

Interactive map of Corpus Christi (on Web site)

Map of the area around the Sigmor Shamrock gas station ()

Video tour of the Sigmor Shamrock gas station (on Web site)

Video tour of Carrizo Street (on Web site)

TIME LINES OF IMPORTANT EVENTS

Time line of important events, 19541999 (on Web site)

Minute-by-minute time line of events at or near the Sigmor Shamrock gas station on February 4, 1983 (on Web site)

Detailed time line of events, 19511999 (on Web site)

PEOPLE WHO APPEAR IN THE WRONG CARLOS AND THEIR RELATIONSHIPS TO ONE ANOTHER

Alphabetical list of key people and their role in the case ( and on Web site)

People listed by categories based on their relationship to Carlos DeLuna and Carlos Hernandez ( and on Web site)

DeLuna and Hernandez family trees (on Web site)

Chart tracing associations among key actors (on Web site)

Chart displaying key legal actors (on Web site)

COLOR VERSIONS OF PHOTOGRAPHS OF PEOPLE AND PLACES, MAPS, AND DIAGRAMS (ON WEB SITE)

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY SOURCES SUPPORTING FACTUAL AND LEGAL STATEMENTS

Nearly four thousand reference notes keyed to specified passages in each chapter, with the sources for each factual and legal claim made, and with hyperlinks to otherwise unpublished primary sources (on Web site)

of sources used in each chapter (at end of book and on Web site)

Bibliography of all sources, listing the chapters in which each source was used, with hyperlinks to the primary source (on Web site)

Collections of important primary materials, including law-enforcement files; crime photographs; court records; newspaper and television reports (including videotapes); and notes, transcripts, and more than two dozen videotapes of witness interviews (on Web site)

In addition to enabling readers to check our work as they go and compare their ultimate conclusions with our own, the Web site should provide a powerful resource for academic and student readers using the book as a tool for understanding the workings of the nations criminal justice and capital punishment systems, and for all readers interested in the anatomy of a criminal and capital case.

WE ARE DEEPLY GRATEFUL for the assistance on this project by friends who at the time of our investigation were at the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (especially William Belford, Reid Pillaphont, and, most especially, Danalynn Recer), the Innocence Project (especially Nina Morrison, Peter Neufeld, and Barry Scheck), and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (especially Miriam Gohara and George Kendall); Michael Banks and colleagues at the Morgan Lewis law firm in Philadelphia; private investigators Peso Chavez, Lauren Eskenazi, Scharlette Holdman, Ron Lax, Susan Montez, Mort Smith, Sita Sovin, Tamara Theiss, and Bruce Whitman; Columbia law-student research assistants Alexandra Blaszczuk, Natasha Bronn, Leslie Demers, Douglas Jaffe, Abshir Kore, David Mattern, Kate McCoy, Laura Lynn Noggle, Jonathan Waisnor, and Kate Weisburd; Columbia Human Rights Law Review editors Derek Borchardt, Gudrun Juffer, Laura Mergenthal, Aerin Miller, Alison Moe, Adam Shpeen, and Caitlin Smith; Columbia Law School support staff Luis Bello, Meredith Cowan, Margaret Symuleski, and especially Frantz Merine; and Allan Bayle, Chuck Blitz, David Bradford, Rhonda Brownstein, Jody Buckley, Peter Davies, Morris Dees, Betsy Fairbanks, Michael Fellner, Stephen Foster, Ruth Friedman, Chris Gomez, Joshua Gray, Wade Greene, Sam Gross, Jamie Guggenheim, Reed Hastings, Mysti Hillis, Mark Horowitz, Henry Liebman, Nick Mc-Keown, David Menschel, Greg Minshall, Rick Perez, Andy Rappaport, Deborah Rappaport, Herbert Sandler, Susan Swanson, Marge Tabankin, Martha Toll, and Scott Wallace.

Key locations in Corpus Christi.

ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 13, 1863, lawmen hanged Chipita Rodriguez from a mesquite tree near Corpus Christi, Texas. Less than a week earlier, a jury had found her guilty of killing a trader for his gold. Both the trader and the sheriff were Anglo, and the sheriff handpicked the jury. Rodriguez was poor and of Mexican descent. She had little in the way of a defense lawyer, who presented even less in the way of a defense.