On Tuesday, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review will devote its spring issue to a 400-page article asserting that the state convicted the wrong man, bypassing a potential suspect who had bragged of killing Lopez. The journal article, "Los Tocayos Carlos: Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution," grew out of a 2003 student project to examine Texas capital cases in which a single eyewitness account was key to conviction. The police are under so much pressure to find someone that something goes wrong.  Page 1 of 1 
 
 The crime scene where Wanda Lopez was murdered is shown on February 4, 1983, in Corpus Christi, Texas. Prosecution defended 
 
 Prosecutors, the article says, knew of Hernandez's violent criminal history. She supplied Hernandez's date of birth, which in turn allowed the unlocking of Hernandez's criminal past as the case rapidly unravelled. Yet he was almost never put in prison for his crimes – a disparity that Liebman believes was because he was used as a police informant. Photo courtesy Columbia Human Rights Law Review 
 
 Corpus Christi police officer Paul Rivera (right) escorts Carlos De Luna charged in stabbing death of clerk at gas station in 1983 (Corpus Christi Caller Times) 
 
 At 24, Wanda Lopez was savvy to the pitfalls of her crime-infested Corpus Christi neighborhood. More than a given name, Carlos DeLuna and Carlos Hernandez shared darkly handsome looks and a history of substance abuse and violence against women. The first arrest was made four years before DeLuna's trial and the second while DeLuna was on death row, yet the connection between this Hernandez and the "phantom" presented to DeLuna's jury was never made. She is confident in the case's outcome, she said, because state and federal courts upheld DeLuna's conviction. He made numerous confessions to having killed Wanda Lopez, the crime for which DeLuna was executed, joking with friends and relatives that his "tocayo" had taken the fall. Yet when Baker was interviewed 20 years later, he said that he hadn't been that sure about the identification as he had trouble telling one Hispanic person apart from another. Leading the investigation at the scene was novice homicide detective Olivia Escobedo. Appeals, the journal says, also were feckless, with one predicating its case on punishment phase defense testimony that never was offered. DeLuna's clothing bore no blood traces, he said, because in his struggle with Lopez, the victim was positioned so that her blood dripped straight down. Maybe those are the cases where miscarriages of justice happen, the routine everyday cases where nobody thinks enough about the victim, let alone the defendant." As for the tocayos Carloses, Carlos Hernandez died of natural causes in a Texas prison in May 1999, having been jailed for assaulting a neighbour with a 9in knife. DeLuna called 'childlike' 
 
 DeLuna, 27, executed for Lopez's murder in December 1989, was "childlike" and a "follower," acquaintances told researchers.
– Carlos DeLuna was executed in 1989 for the murder of Wanda Lopez, but a 400-page article in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review asserts that Texas actually put the wrong man to death, while the real killer bragged about the murder and the fact that DeLuna took the fall. Lopez, a gas station attendant, was stabbed to death in 1983 by a man who had been lurking outside the store and later came in demanding money. The journal article alleges that Carlos Hernandez, who died in prison on other charges in 1999, was the true murderer; DeLuna said the two men had been together at a strip club before the murder, and that he fled when he saw Hernandez attack Lopez. Both DeLuna and Hernandez had histories of violence and substance abuse. Witnesses gave very different descriptions of the suspect, some of which matched DeLuna and others of which matched Hernandez; the two men also happened to look similar. DeLuna was found beneath a nearby truck, with no trace of blood on his white shirt even though Lopez had bled profusely. The only witness who saw the struggle between Lopez and her murderer was only half-sure DeLuna was the right man. The article goes on to assert other problems with the allegedly shoddy investigation and equally incompetent defense assigned to DeLuna. See the Houston Chronicle and the Guardian for more.