From MySanAntonio.com:
Legislative sponsors of a law tightening procedures for police lineups on Tuesday faulted Corpus Christi police for allowing eyewitnesses in a 1983 convenience store robbery-murder to identify the suspect as he sat handcuffed in the back seat of a squad car.
State Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, and Rep. Pete Gallego, D-Alpine, stopped short of claiming Texas wrongfully executed suspect Carlos DeLuna for the February 1983 murder of store clerk Wanda Lopez. However, Gallego said the way police handled the suspect’s identification was a “textbook example” of why the system needs to be reformed.
“What appears to be very faulty eyewitness identification was the main evidence used to reach a conviction in this case,” Ellis said in an email. “The chief witness appears to have gone back and forth on how certain he was that Mr. DeLuna was the culprit. You cannot have this level of uncertainty in death penalty cases.”
Accounts of the crime, the investigation and DeLuna’s prosecution were presented in a 400-page article published Tuesday in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. Columbia University Law School authors argue the crime actually was committed by Carlos Hernandez, a DeLuna acquaintance with a history of convenience store robberies. Hernandez, the article says, boasted of killing the store clerk
DeLuna was executed by lethal injection in 1989. Hernandez, convicted of a knife attack on a female acquaintance, died in prison in 1999.
Fully story here…
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