Texas

During a recent presentation, University of Houston Law Professor David R. Dow shared lessons learned from the 20 years during which he defended over 100 death row inmates. Professor Dow asserted that there are common factors in the lives of those who are currently facing capital punishment. Dow said, “[I]f you tell me the name of a death row inmate - doesn't matter what state he's in, doesn't matter if I've ever met him before - I'll write his biography for you. And eight out of 10 times, the details of that biography will be more or less accurate… Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who came from [some] sort of dysfunctional family…. Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system.” Professor Dow asserts that intervention during earlier stages of defendants’ lives may be one of the most effective ways of preventing them from committing violent crimes later on: “People might disagree about whether [a murderer] should have been executed. But I think everybody would agree that the best possible version … would be a story where no murder ever occurs.” Professor Dow concludes that early intervention is also a more practical use of taxpayers’ money. He said, “[F]or every $15,000 that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save $80,000 in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense.”

In a June 1 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Columbia University law professor James Liebman (pictured) pointed to his recent investigation of a likely innocent man executed in Texas to illustrate the danger of a "cheaper and quicker" death penalty.  Such proposals for reform are “a terrible and dangerous idea,” Liebman said.  Based on his research into the prosecution of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed in 1989, DeLuna’s case “flew through the courts.”  He was arrested and executed within six years, which is half of the national average for capital cases. More than two decades later, an extensive investigation of the case led Prof. Liebman to conclude that DeLuna was almost certainly innocent. “Only a more careful - and consequently longer and more expensive prosecution and appeals process might have prevented the tragedy,” he wrote. He further concluded, “The flaws in the system that condemned DeLuna — faulty eyewitness testimony, poor legal representation and evidence withheld from the defense — continue to put innocent people at risk of execution…. DeLuna's case disproves the myth that we can save the death penalty by generating more 'quick and dirty' executions. The death penalty is broken. At great effort and expense, states such as California have tried every measure to fix it, but they have failed. The only solution is to end it.”

In one of the most comprehensive investigations ever undertaken about the execution of a possibly innocent defendant, Professor James Liebman and other researchers at Columbia University Law School have published a groundbreaking report on the case of Carlos DeLuna (pictured), who was executed in Texas in 1989.  This "Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution" is being published today (May 15) in Columbia's Human Rights Law Review.  Prof. Liebman concluded DeLuna was innocent and was wrongly convicted "on the thinnest of evidence: a single, nighttime, cross-ethnic eyewitness identification and no corroborating forensics." DeLuna maintained his innocence from the time of his arrest until his execution, claiming that the actual culprit was Carlos Hernandez, who looked so similar to DeLuna that friends and family had mistaken photos of the two men for each other. Prosecutors called Hernandez a "phantom" of DeLuna's imagination, although Hernandez was known to police and prosecutors because of his history of violent crimes, including armed robberies and an arrest for a murder similar to the one for which DeLuna was executed. Liebman's investigation found that Hernandez "spent years bragging around Corpus Christi that he, not his tocayo - his namesake and 'twin' - Carlos DeLuna, killed Wanda Lopez."

A recent study released by the Prosecutorial Oversight Coalition and conducted by the Veritas Initiative of California found that although Texas prosecutors committed error in 91 cases between 2004 and 2008, none of those cases resulted in disciplinary action against the prosecutor. Misconduct was found most often in murder cases. Courts upheld the conviction in 72 of the cases and reversed it in 19. At a symposium discussing the research, two men who were wrongfully convicted because of prosecutorial misconduct, Michael Morton of Texas and John Thompson of Louisiana, called for increased accountability in such instances. Thompson spent 16 years on death row and was eventually freed, but a financial judgment he had won against the District Attorney's office was reversed.  In Morton's case, a court of inquiry scheduled to begin in September will investigate whether the prosecutor (who is now a judge) committed criminal misconduct in withholding evidence, resulting in Morton's being wrongly imprisoned for 25 years. Cookie Ridolfi, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and one of the researchers for the study, said, “Most prosecutorial misconduct is not intentional, but we know from John Thompson’s and Michael Morton’s cases that when it happens, the consequences can be devastating. What’s clear from this data is that we’re not doing nearly enough to document the scope of the problem and the disciplinary systems as they currently exist are vastly inadequate.”