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

2012] Los Tocayos Carlos, Part III, Chapter 11 937
on a service contract he negotiated for a mom-and-pop refrigeration
company.
* * * * *
De Peña himself acknowledged years later that the trial for
Carlos DeLuna’s life was one of his first jury trials of any sort, civil or
criminal, minor or major.
Because he was a “solo” practitioner, he had no other lawyers
in his office to help out. “My wife helped me,” he volunteered. She was
a “motivator . . . on a big case.”
Not being a lawyer, however, De Peña’s wife got emotionally
involved in the case in a way Hector didn’t, he recalled with a
chuckle. She got mad at the games she thought the prosecutors
played—making Hector look bad in front of the jury and that sort of
thing. She couldn’t believe that her husband would go out for a cup of
coffee with the younger of the prosecutors, Steven Schiwetz, during
breaks in the trial. Hector told her not to take it personally. The
prosecutors were just doing their job. Lawyers could advocate inside
the courtroom and be friends outside.
Later on, though, Hector saw some wisdom in his wife’s less
trustful view. When he was handling DeLuna’s case, he thought of
prosecutors as “trying to find truth,” as colleagues who would tell you
whatever they knew about the case on a “handshake and gentlemen’s
agreement.” Over time, though, he realized that some of them were
simply looking for “notches in their belt” for every conviction they
could get. “Rambo tactics,” he called it. “Ends justify the means.”
De Peña thought he saw that distinction at play between the
two prosecutors in Carlos DeLuna’s case. “There was Ken Botary,” he
told the investigators, “the older . . . prosecutor, and then [Steven]
Schiwetz, who was his second chair.” “My opinion was that Mr.
Botary was basically trying to make a name for himself”—he “was out
to get a conviction.” Schiwetz, De Peña believed, “was trying to see
that justice was done.”
* * * * *
The difference between the ideal and the reality when it came
to prosecutors was one of De Peña’s belated discoveries in the DeLuna
case.
Another was that, as much as he needed the money, he was in
no position to handle a capital case himself, even with his wife’s
moral support.
* * * * *