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

2012] Los Tocayos Carlos, Part III, Chapter 11 955
showed up in court to try to intimidate him. He didn’t represent cops
much after that.
* * * * *
When Hector De Peña found out what really happened to
Wanda Lopez, he felt that the same desire to protect the Police
Department from embarrassment had influenced the DeLuna
investigation and its aftermath.
Any time you try to convince a jury that your client is
innocent, the most natural question the jurors will have is why in the
world the police would go after someone who didn’t commit the crime,
especially when they’re seeking the death penalty.
When De Peña asked himself why the police hid Wanda’s
earlier call, he thought he had the answer to the jury’s question:
“C.Y.A”. Cover your ass. If you’re law enforcement, you’re supposed to
protect hard-working people like Wanda Lopez from knife-wielding
attackers. If instead you screw up and let her get stabbed to death,
the first thing you might want to do is nab someone and put the focus
on him, as quickly and dramatically as possible.
“I think that when Carlos was arrested,” De Peña reflected in
retrospect, “basically, they were just, they were out to find their goat.”
That was another lesson De Peña learned too late to help
Carlos DeLuna: You have to know when to trust law enforcement to
help you make your case and when to prove it yourself, the way Rene
Rodriguez had.
* * * * *
“The sooner the better” was one more lesson the case taught.
One of the biggest mysteries the out-of-town investigators failed to
solve in 2004 was what happened to the physical evidence in the case
over the preceding two decades.
DNA analysis didn’t exist in 1983 when DeLuna was being
prosecuted. But even today, the bloody murder knife, beer cans,
cigarette butt, and cash, among other things that Escobedo and
Infante picked up at the Sigmor store, could still have traces of
genetic material that modern forensic analysis can detect and link to
a human being.
In 2004, when the investigators looked in the courthouse
vault for the evidence, they found evidence boxes indexed to cases
from long before 1983. The boxes were chock full of guns, knives,
clothing, and all other manner of evidence. But there was no box for
the DeLuna case there.