Man 'Wrongly' Executed For Murder 'Died In Agony'

A man who was 'wrongly' convicted of murder 'died in agony'. His story is the subject of a shocking new documentary. Watch the trailer here:

In 1989, Carlos DeLuna was convicted of killing petrol station clerk Wanda Lopez, who was stabbed to death in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1983.

DeLuna maintained his innocence and insisted the crime was committed by a different Carlos - Carlos Hernandez - but he received a lethal injection, aged 27.

Over the decades since his execution, mounting evidence has been unearthed - notably by a 2012 Columbia Human Rights Law Review investigation - indicating that DeLuna was in fact innocent.

Now, documentary The Phantom explores the tragic miscarriage of justice.

Greenwich Entertainment

Writer and director Patrick Forbes said the process of making the film was infuriating.

Speaking to The Guardian, he said: "At the end of the film I was angrier by far than when I started it.

"Everything in the Carlos DeLuna case that could go wrong did go wrong - there was no proper disclosure, the defence was completely underfunded, the appeal was rushed through.

"Not only was he killed an innocent man, the lethal injections didn't work and he died in agony."

As well as sharing the same name, the man DeLuna said committed the crime happened to look remarkably similar to him.

A key difference was that Hernandez had a history of carrying out similar crimes, whereby he violently assaulted women with the same type of lock-blade buck knife that was used to murder Lopez.

In court though, prosecutors said Hernandez was just a figment of DeLuna's imagination - or 'the phantom'.

Greenwich Entertainment

Forbes hopes the documentary will convince anyone in doubt that there is no place for the death penalty in civilised society.

He said: "Initially, everybody believed one truth: Carlos DeLuna was guilty.

"He had a criminal record, he was found hiding under a truck close to the murder scene, and he concocted this ridiculous defence that the murderer wasn't him but another guy called Carlos. Yeah, right."

He added: "His story shows that capital punishment has no place in a civilized society. If a mistake of this gravity can happen, there is no justification for the death penalty."

The Phantom was released in cinemas on 2 July and you can watch it on demand here.

Topics: TV and Film, Death Penalty, True Crime, crime, Documentary

Jake Massey

Jake Massey is a journalist at LADbible. He graduated from Newcastle University, where he learnt a bit about media and a lot about living without heating. After spending a few years in Australia and New Zealand, Jake secured a role at an obscure radio station in Norwich, inadvertently becoming a real-life Alan Partridge in the process. From there, Jake became a reporter at the Eastern Daily Press. Jake enjoys playing football, listening to music and writing about himself in the third person.

@jakesmassey