Hector De Peña was the first lawyer assigned to defend Carlos ...

950 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711
“[W]e originally tried to get those tapes,” De Peña explained
in 2005, but law enforcement officials said everything had been
erased, “the explanation being that the master tape was only kept for
thirty days and then it was erased and reused.” In the end, all De
Peña and Lawrence received was a cassette of Wanda’s ninety-second
911 call.
A police communications technician explained at trial that
the February 4th master tape had been preserved for months after
the point when it normally would have been reused, and that on June
29, 1983, he had spliced the ninety-second 911 call out of the master
tape and preserved it. The technician testified that the only portion of
the tape his law enforcement superiors had asked him to preserve,
even as of late June, was “the call made in reporting a man with a
knife at 2602 SPID” up to “the point where that call ends” when the
attacker hung up the phone.
In the meantime, police dispatcher Jesse Escochea had made
his own copy of the master tape, which turned up in 2004. His copy
includes not only the 911 part of the call, but the forty-minute
manhunt as well. When prosecutor Schiwetz was asking Escochea
questions during the trial, the dispatcher mentioned in passing that
he and Schiwetz had gone over the manhunt part of the tape together
in preparing for trial. But police and prosecutors never gave the
manhunt part of the tape to De Peña or Lawrence, and the jury never
learned about it. That part of the master tape recording was evidently
destroyed a few days before the trial began.
The defense lawyers and jury in DeLuna’s trial never heard
the repeated police bulletins describing a suspect in a grey
sweatshirt, red flannel jacket, and blue jeans sprinting north away
from the Sigmor at around 8:11 p.m. They never heard Sergeant
Mejia worrying out loud on the radio that the clean-shaven man in a
white dress shirt and black slacks who the Arsuagas saw jogging two
blocks east of the gas station at around 8:05 p.m. was “another”
person, different from the scruffy and mustachioed man Baker saw
tangling with Wanda and fleeing north behind the station. And they
never had a chance to compare any of the descriptions on the tape to
DeLuna’s white button-down shirt, black slacks, and recently shaved
face at the time of his arrest.
The defense lawyers and jury didn’t know that police tracked
a suspect matching Baker’s original description for twenty-five
minutes running north on Dodd Street—the direction Baker saw the
killer flee—and then along McArdle Street to the nursing home,
Domino’s Pizza, and a Circle K at Kostoryz, until Esther Barrera