Starting in 2004, they meticulously chased down every possible lead in the case,
...
What they discovered stunned even Liebman, who, as an expert in America's use of capital punishment,
was well versed in its flaws. "It was a house of cards. We found that everything that could go wrong
did go wrong," he says.
...
DeLuna told the jury that he saw Hernandez inside the Shamrock wrestling with a woman behind the counter...
But the prosecutors ...concluded that Hernandez was a fabrication.
...
By the end of that single day the investigator had uncovered evidence that had eluded scores of Texan
police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges over the six years between DeLuna's arrest and
execution. Carlos Hernandez did indeed exist.
...
In October 1989, just two months before DeLuna was executed, Hernandez was setenced to 10 years'
imprisonment for attempting to kill with a knife another woman called Dina Ybanez...
Yet this was the same Carlos Hernandez who prosecutors told the jury did not exist.
This was the figment of Carlos DeLuna's imagination.
...
Many other glaring discrepancies also stand out in the DeLuna case. He was put on death
row largely on the eyewitness testimony of one man,
Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items
found on the floor of the Shamrock — a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans
— were forensically examined for saliva or blood.
Even the murder weapon, the knife, was not properly examined, though it was covered in blood and flesh.
...
The exceptionally lax treatment of evidence continued even beyond the grave. When Liebman asked to
see all the stored evidence in the case, so that he could subject it to the DNA testing that was not
available to investigators in 1983, he was told that it had all disappeared.
OMG! Stop everything! it seems there was little, if any, evidence to tie De Luna to the crime.
Now he's dead.
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