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

956 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711
They soon found a court document explaining why: Assistant
District Attorney Ken Botary had checked out all the materials right
after the trial in July 1983 and never returned them.
Three times the investigators asked the D.A.’s office for all of
its materials in the Carlos DeLuna/Wanda Lopez case, relying on
Texas’s broad Public Records Act. In response to the first request,
Assistant District Attorney Lance Kutnick (son of psychiatrist Joel
Kutnick) said the office had no records. A second request netted about
thirty pages of police reports. A third request made in person by a
respected local attorney prompted a phone call from the D.A.’s office
saying there were some “boxes” waiting for the investigators to
review. They’d better come look at them soon, because the office was
planning to discard them.
When the investigators arrived two hours later, they received
a lot more pages of documents than they’d received before—about two
hundred, including a stack of rap sheets for men named Carlos
Hernandez with Escobedo’s notes indicating that she passed them on
to the prosecutors in early May 1983. But there were no boxes
containing the physical evidence in the case. Those items were
nowhere to be found.
Any DNA from the case remains at large.
* * * * *
One other thing Lawrence and De Peña never received from
the police before trial was the information Eddie Garza had picked up
from his sources on the street, that a man named Carlos Hernandez
was telling people he killed Wanda Lopez and that Carlos DeLuna
had taken the fall.
“Carlos Hernandez” was the name De Peña and Lawrence
were looking for. If the two defense lawyers had known that police
had picked up a particular, 5’7” tall, 160-pound, wavy-haired
Hispanic man named Carlos Hernandez on the evening of April 3rd
after he was caught lurking outside a 7-Eleven with a knife, that
would have given their investigation just the direction it needed in
the face of their client’s fear and silence.
So would knowing that Infante, the I.D. tech on DeLuna’s
case, had shown a lot of interest in this particular Hernandez’s
fingerprints, back when the man was arrested in April. And that, of
the seven “Carlos Hernandez” rap sheets Detective Escobedo passed
on to prosecutor Schiwetz in May, only the one belonging to this
Carlos Hernandez revealed a history of violence and convictions for
convenience store robberies. And that this Hernandez was well