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New evidence suggests Texas execution was case of mistaken identity
June 26, 2006
Maurice Possley and Steve Mills
www.bradenton.com
More articles on this topic: Death PenaltyCORPUS CHRISTI, Texas – For many years, few questioned whether Carlos De Luna deserved to die.
His execution closed the book on the fatal stabbing of Wanda Lopez, a single mother and gas station clerk whose final, desperate screams were captured on a 911 tape.
Arrested just blocks from the bloody crime scene, De Luna was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death – even though the parolee proclaimed his innocence and named another man as the killer.
But 16 years after he died by lethal injection, the Chicago Tribune has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting the acquaintance De Luna had named to authorities, Carlos Hernandez, killed Lopez on a February night in 1983.
Ending years of silence, Hernandez’s relatives and friends recounted how he repeatedly bragged that De Luna went to Death Row for a murder actually committed by Hernandez, a violent felon who died in 1999. Five people now say Hernandez told them that he stabbed Lopez and that De Luna, whom he called his “stupid tocayo,” or namesake, went to Death Row in his place.
The newspaper investigation, involving interviews with dozens of people and a review of thousands of pages of court records, showed the case was compromised by shaky eyewitness identification, sloppy police work and a failure to seriously consider Hernandez as a possible suspect.
These revelations were never heard by the jury and cast significant doubt over De Luna’s conviction. His case represents one of the most compelling examples yet of the discovery of possible innocence after a prisoner’s execution.
Presented with the results of the newspaper’s inquiry, the lead prosecutor in the case says he is troubled by some of the new information. But he and his co-prosecutor still believe they convicted the right man.
Missing from this case is DNA or some other kind of evidence that could provide conclusive proof of De Luna’s guilt or innocence. The store wasn’t equipped with a security camera that could have captured images of the killer.
The newspaper launched its investigation in late 2005 after learning of the case from a Columbia University law professor who had begun to dig up evidence that he believed warranted further investigation.
Among the paper’s findings:
The prosecution argued that Hernandez was a “phantom,” even though one of the prosecutors knew well of Hernandez but failed to inform De Luna’s attorneys – a potential legal error that could have been reason to overturn his conviction.
The only witness who came face to face with the killer at the station after Lopez was stabbed now says he was not positive of his identification of De Luna. He identified De Luna, he said, after the police told him they had arrested De Luna hiding under a truck near the scene of the attack – information that eased his uncertainty.
The Tribune’s analysis of financial records from the gas station also undermines the state’s assertion that the killing took place during a robbery, an aggravating circumstance that elevated the murder to a death penalty case. Newly examined inventory documents suggest no money was taken at all.
Finally, one of Corpus Christi’s senior detectives at the time of the crime says that, in the weeks after the murder, tipsters told him that Hernandez killed Lopez, the mother of a 6-year-old girl. Yet it appears those tips were not pursued.
The former detective, Eddie Garza, knew both men and said Lopez’s slaying was the kind of crime Hernandez would commit, not De Luna.
“I don’t think (De Luna) had it in him to do something like this and stab somebody to death,” said Garza, now a private detective. But Hernandez, he added, “was a ruthless criminal. He had a bad heart. I believe he was a killer.”
After Hernandez died in prison near Texarkana in 1999, word reached Corpus Christi, and people began to talk.
Janie Adrian remembered how Hernandez bragged about stabbing Lopez, how he said Carlos De Luna, the man who shared his first name, was innocent.
“He said, `My stupid tocayo took the blame for it,’” she recalled recently.
Adrian, a neighbor of Hernandez’s mother, Fidela, said she always thought someone would ask what she knew. They never did, so she never told.
“I kept it to myself,” she said in her Corpus Christi home. “Maybe I could have said something then.”
Dina Ybanez waited because she was afraid. She met Hernandez in 1985, and after he befriended her and her husband he confided that he killed Lopez.
“He said he was the one that did it, but that they got somebody else – his stupid tocayo – for that one,” Ybanez said in an interview. “Carlos would just laugh about it because he got away with it.”
Ybanez said she so feared his violent temper that she never contacted police about his admission, not even after he cut her from her navel to her sternum during a quarrel in 1989. “He said he was going to kill me like he did her,” she said.
Beatrice Tapia and Priscilla Jaramillo never spoke about what they knew because they wanted to forget.
Although they had not seen each other in years, they independently recalled the same chilling details from the day they heard Hernandez say he killed Lopez.
Jaramillo is Hernandez’s niece, and during the 1980s she lived at his mother’s home and, she said, was later sexually abused by him there. Not long after Lopez was slain, Jaramillo, then 11, and Tapia, 16, a neighborhood friend, were sitting on the front steps, mostly talking but also listening to Hernandez and his brother Javier, who were on the porch drinking beer.
Carlos Hernandez told his brother that he had killed the woman at the gas station.
“He was saying he did something wrong and said Wanda’s name. He said he killed her,” recalled Tapia, who still lives in Corpus Christi. “He said he felt sorry about it.”
De Luna’s appeals ran out in 1989. The possibility of innocence played no role in his final appeal, which focused on his lawyers’ failure to present any mitigating evidence at his sentencing hearing.
When that failed, and when the governor declined to grant him clemency, De Luna quietly accepted his fate a few minutes after midnight on Dec. 7, 1989. He thanked the warden for being treated well by the guards and prayed on his knees with the death-house chaplain, Carroll Pickett.
When they began, Pickett noticed, De Luna was sitting on the side of the bunk; by the end, he had gone down to his knees on the cell’s cold, cement floor.
Just after midnight, Pickett led De Luna into the execution chamber.
De Luna hoisted himself onto the gurney and, as guards strapped him down, called out in a fearful voice: “Where’s chaplain? Where’s chaplain? Are you here, chaplain?”
Pickett watched as a needle was inserted into De Luna’s left arm, and when another needle pierced his right arm the pastor placed his hand on De Luna’s leg.
De Luna then made a final statement. “I wanted to say I hold no grudges. I hate no one. I love my family,” he said. “Tell everyone on Death Row to keep the faith and don’t give up.”
At that, the flow of lethal chemicals began.
Despite Pickett’s assurances that the drugs would render De Luna unconscious in no more than 12 seconds, it took nearly three times that long. Twice De Luna struggled to raise his head and speak to Pickett, but couldn’t.
Finally, at 12:24 a.m., nearly a half-hour after he had entered the execution chamber, De Luna emitted a groan. Pickett trembled as he stared at De Luna’s body on the gurney.
Later, Pickett tape-recorded his memory of that night. “This one, I wonder, what was he trying to tell me, if anything, when he raised up his head? I continue to see those brown eyes. What did he say? What did he think? … That I will never forget.”
By the time De Luna was executed, Hernandez was on his way back to prison for the attack on Ybanez.
At the time, Hernandez was living in Ybanez’s garage, baby-sitting her children in the daytime. During an argument, Ybanez told police, Hernandez pulled a knife out of his back pocket and attacked her. He ran away but was arrested a short distance away, wearing bloody jeans.
Hernandez pleaded guilty to the assault and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
“He told me he was going to kill me,” Ybanez said in a recent interview, “because he wasn’t used to leaving live victims.”
He served less than two years before he was paroled and moved back to Corpus Christi.
Hernandez went to prison for the last time in 1996 after he assaulted a man. When police arrested him, he was carrying two knives.
He never got out. The years of heavy drinking finally caught up to him in the spring of 1999, at age 44. Suffering from cirrhosis, he was confined to the prison infirmary.
On the evening of May 6, 1999, he died, and his body was taken to an inmate cemetery. His mother would not bring his casket home.
She said she told the prison authorities: “Bury him in the dirt there.”
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