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

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2012] Los Tocayos Car rlos, Part III, , Chapter 11 957 known n to Escobedo o and prosecu utor Botary aas the primee suspect in thhe knifing and beatin ng death of a young Daahlia Sauceddo three yeaars before e. Learning any a of those things, De PPeña told thee investigatorrs, “I mean, that obv viously woul ld have beenn a quantumm leap in thhe defens se had we go otten this in nformation.” Each piece of information would have mad de a “great deal of diifference,” a “tremendous differe ence,” if any y of them ha ad been sharred before trrial. But none were. “Leaves a pretty bad ta aste in my mmouth, even nnow,” De Peñña said, many m years la ater. Figure 31. July 198 83 TV news im mages of (top, from left) prrosecutors Stevven Schiwetz, and Kennet th Botary, (bott tom, from left) defendant Carrlos DeLuna, aand defense e lawyers James s Lawrence and d Hector De Peñña. * * * * *
958 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711 In fact, Lawrence and De Peña did get the name “Carlos Hernandez” before the trial started. What they got, however, was very little and very late. The lawyers spent July 5th to July 13th selecting a jury to decide DeLuna’s case. The judge gave the jurors a day off before the trial started on Friday July 15th. For months until then, Carlos DeLuna had urged first De Peña, and then Lawrence, to find the unnamed—and frighteningly un-nameable—man he said he’d seen attacking Wanda Lopez. He begged them to ask the judge for more help and more time. He even asked the judge himself, in his awkwardly scribbled missives with their jumble of ill-fitting words. He hoped that any trouble proving a case against him would push the police themselves to look elsewhere. On July 15th, time ran out. Trial was going to start without anyone calling the name of the man he saw. “We’re down to the closing moments of this thing before we went to trial,” De Peña recalled, when Carlos finally gave his lawyers the name himself: Carlos Hernandez. But those two very common proper names were the only thing he would give his lawyers. “‘I gave you the name,’” De Peña remembered DeLuna saying, “and that was as far as he was going to go.” He was a “dead” man, he said, whether the jury condemned him or not, if Hernandez found out that DeLuna “put the bite on” him. De Peña believed Carlos Hernandez existed, but he also could tell that “Carlos DeLuna was not going to assist me in actually pinpointing who the real Carlos Hernandez was.” “We didn’t have doodly,” Lawrence confirmed, “no height, weight, date of birth.” If he’d just had a date of birth, Lawrence lamented, “I could’ve found [him]. We never got that far because we just had a name.” With their client again putting the burden on them to prove his defense, Lawrence and De Peña did what they had done earlier with their lead about Mary Ann Perales. They immediately passed the name on to Escobedo, Botary, and Schiwetz, still relying on the police and prosecutors to prove the defendant’s case and blow up their own. The prosecutors had another lesson in store for Hector De Peña.
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