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

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.