Death Penalty News

In shocking new documentary The Phantom , the story of Carlos DeLuna, an innocent man accused of murder, shines a light on the many problems with the death penalty In the final minutes of The Phantom, Patrick Forbes’ shattering new documentary on the American death penalty, a prosecutor from Texas who possesses an uncanny resemblance to a grizzly bear shares with us his thoughts on crime and punishment. “The justice system’s about keeping people from killing each other,” Steve Schiwetz begins. “Does it work perfectly?” he goes on, the faintest smile flickering disconcertingly across his face. “Of course not, nothing does. We’re humans.” And then, in one of several jaw-dropping instances in the movie, he quotes Immanuel Kant. “The crooked timber of humanity, out of which nothing straight can be made. Right?” The tableau leaves the viewer with so many bewildering questions. Is the prosecutor unaware of the booming irony of his comment that by sending people to the death chamber the state...

President Biden’s Justice Department recently filed a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who, along with his older brother, bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013. Many would argue this case is the exact reason we need the death penalty: to punish the worst of the worst crimes. While the acts committed by Tsarnaev were indeed horrific, we embrace the thinking espoused by then-candidate Joe Biden, who pledged to eliminate the death penalty — a process plagued by racial disparities and wrongful convictions of the innocent. As prosecution leaders, we believe our criminal legal system is fully capable of punishing tragic crimes harshly and protecting our communities without resorting to this broken part of our criminal justice system. Indeed, capital punishment says more about us as a nation that it does about those we punish. This week marks the 45th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstitute the death penalty after stopping ...

Since 2006, the possibility that Texas officials executed an innocent man and left a serial killer on the loose has looked increasingly certain through a series of headlines, at least one book, and an entire issue of Columbia Law School’s Human Rights Law Review. An upcoming documentary called " The Phantom " is now revealing new details about the case that removes almost any doubt that Carlos DeLuna was unjustly put to death by the state in 1989. DeLuna, a young Latino man who was 20 years old at the time, was convicted of killing Wanda Lopez, a gas-station employee and single mother, in 1983 in Corpus Christi. His is the first case listed in the Death Penalty Information Center’s “Executed But Possibly Innocent” report, a list of executions that involved strong evidence of innocence. Roughly 60% of the 185 people who have been exonerated of death sentences since 1973 are either Black or Latino, according to the center. Evidence in DeLuna’s case pointed to another Carlos – l...

"I didn't do it, but I know who did." Those were the words of Carlos DeLuna, a young Latino man who Texas executed in 1989. At trial, DeLuna said that another man—Carlos Hernandez—murdered Wanda Lopez, a single mother stabbed to death while working at a convenience store in Corpus Christi. The prosecution told the jury that Carlos Hernandez was a "phantom" DeLuna made up. In reality, police and prosecutors knew Hernandez, knew of his history of convenience store robberies and knew he used the same kind of knife that killed Lopez to kill another young Latina woman and to nearly kill a third. A decade ago, as a law student at Columbia University, other students and I reviewed thousands of pages of trial transcripts, government files and witness interviews to uncover the truth: The state arrested, convicted and executed the wrong Carlos. Our team even discovered a 40-minute audiotape of the police manhunt just after the murder. The tape—which police kept from the j...

On December 7, 1989, Carlos DeLuna was executed by the state of Texas for the brutal murder of a convenience store clerk named Wanda Lopez. But from the moment he was arrested at age 20 until his dying breath, DeLuna maintained he was an innocent man. He did not stab Lopez, he said, but he knew who did: a friend named Carlos Hernandez, a violent criminal who looked so much like DeLuna that even their friends and family members confused pictures of one for the other. On the stand, DeLuna pointed the finger at Hernandez, saying he had seen him struggling with Lopez, a 24-year-old single mother, inside the Sigmor Shamrock gas station's store in Corpus Christi, Texas, on the night of February 4, 1983. Hearing police sirens and fearing his criminal history would make him a suspect, DeLuna said he fled. He hid under a pickup truck not far from the scene until police arrested him a short time later. At the trial, the lead prosecutor said Carlos Hernandez was "a phantom." He was ...

The Supreme Court said Monday that Arkansas won't be able to execute two of its death-row inmates. And a growing number of conservatives, who see the death penalty as an anachronistic, religiously hypocritical and big-government waste of money, are just fine with that. In fact, the extreme nature of Arkansas' efforts to execute eight inmates over a week and a half — after going 12 years without an execution — could even underscore anti-death-penalty conservatives' argument about why it should be abolished. And what conservatives think about the death penalty matters perhaps more than it does for any other political faction: Public support for the death penalty and actual executions is at or near a 40-year-low . But Republicans control a majority of state legislatures and governor's mansions, so any movement to actually undo it will likely be driven by conservatives. For the most part, the GOP in Arkansas fully supports the efforts of Gov. Asa Hutchinson ...

Most death row inmates may be racing against time when it comes down to their final days, waiting for a court to halt their execution often just hours before it's scheduled.  But it was a different kind of race for Max Soffar, who had his own biological clock to battle with as he looped through the lengthy, convoluted appeals process. For years, his committed defense team had worked feverishly to secure an exoneration based on a false confession. But on Sunday evening, at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Soffar's time expired. He died of terminal liver cancer in the death row infirmary; he had spent 35 of his 60 years in prison. Although no physical evidence had ever connected Soffar to the murders, he was convicted in 1982 of shooting 3 employees of a Houston bowling alley, execution-style. The crime rattled the city for months. With the help of a witness who survived a bullet to the head, a police detective drew up a sketch of the suspect and offered a $15,000 ...

Craig Watkins The Columbia Human rights Law Review opened up a new can of worms on the death penalty in Texas this week with its book-length examination of the 1989 execution of Carlos DeLuna . The bottom line, according to the report, is that the state executed the wrong man for the stabbing death of 24-year-old Wand Lopez in a Corpus Christi convenience store. Researchers say prosecutors bypassed another person who bragged of killing Lopez. On the heels of that report, death penalty abolitionist Rick Halperin, a professor at Southern Methodist University, told the website Dallas South News he would be on the courthouse steps in Dallas on Friday to lean on Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins to stop seeking lethal injection in capital cases. Asked Thursday whether Watkins had read the Columbia report and, if so, would altter his stance on the death penalty, spokeswoman Jamille Bradfield released this terse statement: "We are declining comment." ...