The Champion
A sad, absorbing, and profoundly important tale of a wrongful conviction and execution. Everyone with an interest in criminal justice and every public official with responsibility in this realm should place it high on their reading list.
Boston Globe
This case is examined to such an earth's-core depth - the book is full of site maps and footnotes and its website features much more – that readers will come away absolutely convinced that the conviction of Carlos DeLuna was a profound injustice.
Austin Sarat
Given the quality of the work and the importance of the subject, this book will become a classic in the field. It is as good a book about the death penalty as I have ever read.
Peter J. Neufeld and Barry Scheck
A masterful deconstruction of the Lopez murder and police investigation followed by the prosecution and execution of the wrong man. Given the number of men already exonerated from death row and the unacceptable incidence of innocent men convicted of capital crimes, there can be no doubt that innocent men have been executed by the state. Liebman's command of the facts and intellectual precision, ultimately infused with a moral urgency, makes a compelling claim that Carlos DeLuna is one of those innocent men.
Meghan Ryan
Liebman and his coauthors tell an important story of alleged wrongful execution. The story of Carlos DeLuna highlights several important yet often overlooked problems plaguing our criminal justice system, ranging from the pitfalls of eyewitness identification to the disadvantages of the restrictions of habeas corpus.
Jordan Steiker
This book is distinctive in its sheer comprehensiveness of investigation and presentation. It will be an instant classic in criminology.
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2014-05-18
A Columbia Law School professor and some of his students gather and present evidence establishing the innocence of Carlos DeLuna, executed for murder in Texas in 1989.Legal scholar Liebman (co-author: Federal Habeas Corpus Practice and Procedure, 2001) begins (and ends) with Justice Antonin Scalia, who famously said in 2006 that there has not been a single case of wrongful execution. Perhaps this one will change his message? The author acquired the old transcripts, interviewed many of those involved, read the newspaper clippings and watched the TV news coverage—in general, he and his team behaved as the authorities in Corpus Christi should have but manifestly didn't. In 1983, DeLuna was accused of stabbing Wanda Lopez, a gas station clerk, and was apprehended less than an hour later. Intellectually damaged, DeLuna denied the crime from the beginning to the very moment of his execution. Liebman and the others discovered that there was another Carlos—Carlos Hernandez—who was patently guilty. He and DeLuna looked a lot alike, but the violent Hernandez, a career criminal who later died in prison, carried (and often used) a knife and later told more than one person that he had actually committed the murder. Liebman's team went over the physical evidence thoroughly (there was none connecting DeLuna to the case) and tacitly and explicitly accuse the Corpus Christi authorities of a rush to judgment. The author offers numerous photographs, charts and other documents (some are from police reports and trial evidence), as well as a website that presents much more of it. The chapter about DeLuna's execution is wrenching. Liebman concludes with thoughts about how something like this could happen—and what we need to do to prevent it from happening again.Death penalty opponents now have a definitive example to cite; death penalty proponents have an agonizing case to consider.
