Death of an innocent man

In November, California voters will be asked to decide—via the SAFE initiative on the Nov. 6 ballot—whether they want to join the 17 other states that have abolished the death penalty in favor of life without the possibility of parole. There are many reasons for doing so, some moral, others practical, cost being one of the latter: The state has spent $4 billion to execute just 13 people since 1978 and could save $1 billion over five years by getting rid of death row.

From a moral standpoint, we must recognize that human beings inevitably make mistakes, but there is no rectifying the death of an innocent person. The Innocence Project, which uses DNA testing to overturn wrongful convictions, has freed 289 people wrongfully convicted of serious crimes in the United States, 17 of whom had been sentenced to death.

Do we know for sure that innocent people have been put to death? Yes, we do. There was the case in Texas of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in 2004 for murdering his three children by setting his home on fire. Advances in arson science subsequently showed with near certainty that he didn’t do it.

Of course, near certainty is not the same as absolute certainty. But there’s another case from Texas—a state that seems to relish executions, having put 482 people to death since 1982—in which the death of an innocent man is absolutely certain. He was Carlos DeLuna, and on Dec. 8, 1989, at the age of 26, he was executed for stabbing a young woman to death in a Corpus Christi gas station robbery.

Earlier this month Columbia Law School released a book-length account based on the six years professor James Liebman and 12 students spent detailing the multitudinous errors that led to DeLuna’s arrest and conviction for a crime someone else committed. That someone was Carlos Hernandez, who looked enough like DeLuna to be his twin, and who died in a Texas prison while serving time on another stabbing beef.

DeLuna knew Hernandez—and also knew he was the killer. He saw him in the gas station wrestling with a woman behind the counter. Frightened, he ran away. Hearing sirens, he hid. He was found a few minutes later. At trial, prosecutors called Hernandez “a figment of DeLuna’s imagination.”

But he was real, and at large in the Corpus Christi community, where he made numerous confessions to having killed the woman and joked that his tocayo, or namesake, had taken the fall. Four years after DeLuna’s death a private investigator did in a day what scores of police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges had failed to do: He found that Carlos Hernandez did exist.

Go to http://tinyurl.com/tocayos for a detailed account of how DeLuna was wrongfully convicted and executed. It’s harrowing, but it’s also something we should remember when we consider whether to maintain the death penalty in California.