‘The Phantom’: A Documentary About the Wrongful Execution of Carlos DeLuna Premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival

A new doc­u­men­tary about the case of Carlos DeLuna, a like­ly inno­cent man who was exe­cut­ed in Texas in 1989, pre­mieres June 14, 2021 at the Tribeca Film Festival.

The Phantom, based on an inves­ti­ga­tion by Columbia Law School Professor James Liebman and his stu­dents that cul­mi­nat­ed in the book, The Wrong Carlos, tells the sto­ry of the flawed inves­ti­ga­tion into the 1983 mur­der of Wanda Lopez, a sin­gle moth­er who was killed dur­ing a rob­bery of the con­ve­nience store where she worked. DeLuna not only main­tained his inno­cence in Lopez’s mur­der, but told author­i­ties he knew the real per­pe­tra­tor — Carlos Hernandez, a man with a his­to­ry of vio­lent crime who looked so much like DeLuna that their own fam­i­lies mis­took them for one another. 

Prosecutors called Hernandez ​“a phan­tom,” claim­ing that DeLuna had made him up to escape blame. In fact, they knew Carlos Hernandez was real and were aware both of his his­to­ry of rob­bing con­ve­nience stores and his use of a knife sim­i­lar to the one used to murder Lopez. 

DeLuna’s tri­al and exe­cu­tion present a case study in offi­cial mis­con­duct, mis­tak­en wit­ness iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, and racial bias — sys­temic prob­lems that per­vade the admin­is­tra­tion of the death penal­ty across the United States and, the film argues, con­tribute to wrong­ful con­vic­tions and risk wrongful executions.

After the killing, police spent half an hour pur­su­ing a man whose clothes matched the descrip­tion of what Hernandez was wear­ing before arrest­ing DeLuna instead. They with­held an audio tape of that chase at DeLuna’s tri­al. No foren­sic evi­dence linked DeLuna to the crime, and police ignored a bloody foot­print at the scene that did not match DeLuna’s unblood­ied shoes. Hernandez report­ed­ly admit­ted to at least five friends and fam­i­ly mem­bers that he had killed Lopez. ​“He said he was the one that did it, but that they got some­body else — his stu­pid tocayo (name­sake) — for that one,” said Dina Ybanez, Hernandez’s for­mer land­la­dy who appears in The Phantom.

The movie also shows how racial bias con­tributed to the shod­dy inves­ti­ga­tion of Lopez’s mur­der. Rene Rodriguez, the lawyer for Lopez’s fam­i­ly, said offi­cials in Corpus Christi, where the crime took place, didn’t care about crimes against Latinx peo­ple. ​“If it involves some­body of col­or, they don’t give a sh – ,” Rodriguez said. ​“That’s one less Mexican. That’s the way it was back then.”

Patrick Forbes, the direc­tor of The Phantom, agreed. ​“Corpus was then a very vio­lent, very dan­ger­ous town, and it had with­in it, a stra­ta of poor Hispanic fam­i­lies who the cops were just not going to exert them­selves over whether you were the vic­tim, or indeed the per­pe­tra­tor,” Forbes said. ​“And all three peo­ple caught up in this hor­ri­ble sto­ry had the mis­for­tune of being poor and Hispanic.”

In 2003, Liebman and his stu­dents began inves­ti­gat­ing DeLuna’s case. Their inves­ti­ga­tion prompt­ed a series of award-win­ning inves­tiga­tive reports in the Chicago Tribune in 2006. Following addi­tion­al inves­ti­ga­tion, The Wrong Carlos was pub­lished in 2012.

The movie’s the­atri­cal and on-demand release date of July 2 is timed to coin­cide with the 45^th anniver­sary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s deci­sion in Gregg v. Georgia, which allowed exe­cu­tions to resume in the United States. In con­junc­tion with the release of the movie, a coali­tion of crim­i­nal legal reform advo­cates have start­ed a peti­tion urg­ing President Biden to com­mute the death sen­tences of every­one on fed­er­al death row.