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

936 COLUMBIA HUMAN RIGHTS LAW REVIEW [43.3:711
When Judge Blackmon appointed Hector De Peña to
represent Carlos DeLuna, the criminal defense lawyers in town were
shocked and a little resentful. It wasn’t just that De Peña wasn’t of
the caliber of criminal defense attorneys usually tapped for that kind
of assignment. It was that De Peña wasn’t a criminal defense lawyer
at all. He was a small-time general practitioner, the kind of lawyer
who takes whatever comes in the door: wills, bankruptcies, contracts
for the sale of a home, speeding tickets, you name it.
Lawyers like that didn’t usually handle a lot of major
criminal cases, let alone ones that ended up in actual trials in court in
front of a jury. De Peña was no exception. When he was assigned the
DeLuna case, he had never represented a criminal defendant in front
of a jury on any kind of serious criminal charge, let alone a capital
murder charge. As Jon Kelly told the investigators, with all due
respect for a Corpus colleague who later became a pretty good judge,
Hector De Peña, Jr., wasn’t on anyone’s mental list of lawyers you’d
consider for a capital murder case.
Other opinions were blunter: De Peña was incompetent to
handle a capital case. He was out of his league. He may not have been
“up to a capital murder [case].”
No one knew for sure why Blackmon appointed De Peña to
represent DeLuna, but there was talk. It was rumored that De Peña
was having trouble making ends meet. His father, Hector, Sr., was a
long-time local judge who had some clout with voters (judges are
elected in Texas) and other judges. Lawyers in town speculated that
Blackmon’s assignment was a favor to Hector, Sr. on behalf of a son
who was short on cash. “You could make $15-20,000 in a month on a
capital case,” Kelly pointed out. “That was a nice piece of change.”
At least part of the speculation was true. In 1984, a year after
representing Carlos DeLuna for capital murder, De Peña represented
himself in a bankruptcy filing. His papers said he had almost $50,000
in unpaid debts going back as far as 1969, with only $8,000 in assets
consisting mainly of a 1982 Saab.
De Peña opened his law office in 1978. From the start, the
bankruptcy papers show, his practice generated too little money to
cover his rent, credit card bills, and car payments. For a time, he
survived on loans from six different banks and credit unions, but by
the early 1980s he began defaulting on the loans, and his creditors
were hauling him into court. Every cent De Peña earned from
assigned cases like DeLuna’s went directly to the IRS for unpaid
taxes. Adding to his problems, De Peña faced a malpractice suit
claiming he failed to file a routine mechanic’s lien to secure payment