Boston Review — Gabriel O’Malley: The Execution of Carlos DeLuna:
Despite this trend, one rhetorical point has persisted for death penalty advocates: if the judicial system were so bad, and innocents were being killed, we surely would have heard about it by now. “We would not have to hunt for it,” Justice Antonin Scalia said recently, “the innocent’s name would be shouted from the rooftops.” We have heard of innocents being released, the argument goes, but it has never been clear that the state has executed an individual for a crime he or she did not commit.
That is, until now.
In May, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review dedicated an entire issue to the story of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1989. The article, “Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution,” forthcoming as a book, runs 434 pages long, reads like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and is groundbreaking in its detail and scope. Its conclusion: Texas murdered an innocent man.