This list was compiled by Listserve founder James Frater. Mr. Fraters’s descriptions of these cases have been shortened and, in some cases, simplified by Patrick H. Moore. It is interesting to note that while these men may well have been wrongfully executed, they were hardly “boy scouts”.
#10 Carlos Z. De Luna
In February of 1983, Carlos Z. De Luna just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, drinking in public when Wanda Lee was stabbed to death at a gas station across the street from a bar where he was drinking. Aware that he was violating his parole, De Luna panicked and hid under a pick-up truck. The police found him and arrested him for the murder, even though there was not a speck of blood on his hands or clothing, and the crime scene was a bloody mess. The only other eyewitness, Kevin Baker, agreed with police that De Luna was the perpetrator simply because the police told him De Luna was the right guy.
At his trial, De Luna fingered Carlos Hernandez as the real perpetrator but it did no good even though Hernandez had a long arrest record complete with knifings similar to the convenience store killing. In fact, Hernandez repeatedly bragged to friends and relatives that he had committed the murder. Not only that, but he had been romantically linked to Lopez. De Luna’s lawyers didn’t bother to bring this information to the jury’s attention. On December 7, 1989, Texas executed 27-year old Carlos De Luna.
#9 Larry Griffin
On June 26, 1980 in St. Louis, Missouri, 19-year-old Quintin Moss was killed in a drive-by shooting while allegedly dealing drugs on a street corner. Larry Griffin was railroaded and found guilty based mostly on the testimony from Robert Fitzgerald, a white career criminal, who was at the scene at the time of the murder. Fitzgerald testified that Griffin was one of three black guys riding in a car and that he’d shot the victim through the window of the car with his right hand. Griffin’s lawyer, who was new to the trade, failed to inform the jury that Griffin was left-handed. He also failed to produce a witness who was with Griffin at another location at the time of the murder and could have given him a strong alibi.
To make it worse, Griffin’s fingerprints were not found on the car or the weapon – and there is evidence that suggests Fitzgerald was promised a reduced sentence in a case he was fighting in exchange for his testimony. Despite overwhelming evidence that Griffin was innocent, a Court of Appeals upheld his conviction and death sentence. Griffin was executed by lethal injection on June 21, 1995.
#8 Ruben Cantu
On the night of November 8, 1984, Ruben Cantu and his friend David Garza, allegedly broke into a vacant San Antonio house under construction and robbed two men at gunpoint. The two victims, Pedro Gomez and Juan Moreno, had been sleeping on floor mattresses at a the job site. Gomez tried to retrieve a pistol hidden under his mattress and was shot and killed instantly.
The surviving victim, Moreno, he was unable to identify his attacker. Nonetheless, with no physical evidence, no confession, and only Moreno’s subsequently recanted testimony, the jury convicted Ruben Cantu of first-decree murder. Juan Moreno has since stated that he felt intense police pressure police to finger Cantu. David Garza, Cantu’s codefendant, has since admitted his involvement in the burglary, assault and murder, stating he went inside the house with another boy, participated in the robbery, and saw the murder take place, but that his accomplice was not Ruben Cantu.
On August 24, 1993, Ruben Cantu at the age of 26, was executed by lethal injection. His final request was for a piece of bubble gum, which was denied.
#7 David Spence
In 1982, David Spence was accused of the rape and murder of two 17-year-old girls and one 18-year-old boy in Waco, Texas. He received the death penalty in two separate trials. Muneer Deeb, a convenience store owner, who allegedly hired Spence to do the murders, was also charged, convicted and sentenced to death. Deeb won a motion for a new trial in 1993 and was later acquitted.
The case against Spence was built around bite marks that an “expert witness” said matched Spence’s teeth, and the testimony of jailhouse snitches. Two of the six witnesses later recanted, and admitted they were given cigarettes, television and alcohol privileges, as well as conjugal visits in return for testifying falsely. Spence’s post-conviction lawyers confirmed through a blind study that the bite marks could not be matched to Spence’s. Even the original homicide investigator on the case said he had serious doubts about Spence’s guilt. Furthermore, a former Waco police detective involved in the case said he did not think Spence committed the crime. None of it did Spence any good. He was executed by lethal injection on April 14, 1997.
# 6 Jesse Tafero
The painful and botched death of Jesse Tafero is the stuff nightmares are made of and remind us that you need to be careful who you associate with. Of course, we already knew that. Poor Jesse, two cops — Philip Black and Donald Irwin — roust him, his girlfriend Sonia “Sunny” Jacobs and their associate Walter Rhodes at a rest stop. Somehow, both cops are shot and killed. Then Tafero and company flee in the police vehicle but are apprehended at a roadblock. Tafero has the gun tucked into his waistband.
At their trial, Rhodes testifies that Tafero and Jacobs were solely responsible for the murders. They are both convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. Rhodes gets off easy with three life sentences. He’s paroled in 1994 for good behavior. Because the jury had recommended a life sentence for Jacobs, the court commutes her sentence to life in prison, but not Tafero’s. Then she’s released after agreeing to a plea bargain. The catch is that on several occasions prior to his release, Rhodes confessed to lying about his involvement in the shooting. And even Sunny Jacobs claimed that Rhodes, not Tafero, carried out the shooting. It did Tafero no good; he went to the electric chair on May 4, 1990. And the chair malfunctioned causing 13 minutes of agony before he drew his last breath.
#5 Ellis Wayne Felker
Ellis Wayne Felker was a suspect in the 1981 disappearance of a Georgia cocktail waitress and college student, Evelyn Joy Ludlum. While Felker was under police surveillance, Ludlum’s body was found in a creek — raped, stabbed and murdered. An autopsy found that the body had been dead for five days, which would have eliminated Felker as a suspect. Subsequent independent autopsies found that the body had been dead no more than three days and he was convicted of the murder and given the death penalty.
In 1996, Felker’s attorneys discovered boxes of evidence that had been unlawfully withheld by the prosecution, including a written confession by another suspect. Even the presiding judge in one of Felker’s trials stated that his right to a fair trial had been severely compromised. Despite the mounting exculpatory evidence, the Georgia Supreme Court denied Felker a new trial. His lawyers never had time to sort through the mounds of evidence and Felker was executed by electrocution on November 15, 1996. He was 48. DNA testing was performed in 2000 in the first-ever attempt by a court in the United States to exonerate an executed person. The results, however, were inconclusive.
#4 Leo Jones
On May 23, 1981, a Jacksonville, FL police officer, Thomas Szafranski, was killed when shots were fired at his police cruiser, when he was stopped at an intersection. Mere minutes later, police officers busted into Leo Jones’ apartment where they found him with his cousin, Bobby Hammonds. Both men were taken in for questioning and Jones was charged with murder. The police claimed he had confessed. 16 years later in 1997, a retired police officer, Cleveland Smith, came forward and said the officer that arrested Jones had bragged that he beat Jones after his arrest. Smith, who claimed that the reason he waited so long to come forward with this evidence was because he wanted to secure his pension, described the officer as an “enforcer”, and testified that he once watched him get a confession through torture.
The amazing thing was more than a dozen people had implicated another man as the killer. Even Florida Supreme Court Justice Leander Shaw wrote that Jones’ case had become “a horse of a different color”. Shaw wrote that newly discovered evidence “casts serious doubt on Jones’ guilt.” Shaw and one other judge voted to grant Jones a new trial. A five-judge majority, however, ruled against him. Jones got chair on March 24, 1998.
#3 Cameron Todd Willingham
A 1991 fire at Cameron Todd Willingham’s home in Texas killed his three young daughters. Willingham escaped with minor injuries and his wife was not home. Willingham was charged with starting the fire in an attempt to cover up his abuse of his girls. This was despite the wife’s testimony that he, in fact, “spoiled them rotten.” The prosecutors alleged that an accelerant fluid was deliberately poured near the front porch, the children’s bedroom, and in the hallway. Gerald Hurst, who has a PhD in chemistry, reputed claims that the extreme heat of the fire meant that an accelerant was used. The Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored Hurst’s argument and denied Willingham clemency.
Willingham was deemed an “extremely severe sociopath” by a psychiatrist based on him possessing Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin albums which apparently meant he was fascinated with violence and death. Witness testimony was contradictory and inconclusive. Willingham was offered a life term in exchange for a guilty plea which he turned down, insisting he was innocent. He was executed by lethal injection on February 17, 2004. In June 2009, the State of Texas ordered an unprecedented re-examination of the case and is expected to eventually issue a new ruling.
#2 Joseph O’Dell
When Helen Schartner was raped and murdered by strangulation outside a nightclub in Virginia Beach, Joseph O’Dell was already on parole for kidnapping and robbery convictions in Florida. O’Dell made the mistake of representing himself at trial and was convicted of the murder based solely on blood evidence and the testimony of a jailhouse “snitch.” There was nothing else linking O’Dell to the crime.
Over the next decade, O’Dell brought unsuccessful appeals before the Virginia Supreme Court, the Federal District Court, and the Supreme Court, where Justice Harry Blackmun found “serious questions as to whether O’Dell committed the crime.” O’Dell’s lawyers introduced an affidavit claiming that another inmate executed in 1993, David Mark Pruett, had confessed to the crime. O’Dell requested DNA testing but was turned down. An International campaign to save his life included Mother Teresa and Pope John Paul II. Nonetheless, the governor of Virginia and the U.S. Supreme Court rejected last-minute pleas to spare his life. O’Dell was executed by lethal injection on July 23, 1997. In 2000, the remaining DNA evidence in his case was burned without any further testing.
#1 Lionel Herrera
A Texas Department of Public Safety Officer, David Rucker, was shot and killed along a stretch of highway near the Rio Grande Valley in 1981. Another police officer Enrique Carrisalez pulled over a speeding vehicle near where Rucker’s body was found. Words were exchanged and the driver pulled out his gun and shot Carrisalez. Lionel Herrera was arrested a few days later and charged with both murders. Before he died, Carrisalez identified Herrera as the person who shot him from a single photograph shown to him in the hospital (not a photo array). A year later, Herrera was tried and found guilty of the capital murder of Carrisalez. He received the death peanalty. Later that year, Herrera pleaded guilty to the murder of Rucker.
Herrera filed a petition for writ of habeas corpus in federal court, claiming that new evidence demonstrated he was innocent of the murder of Carrisalez. Four affidavits were included from an attorney who had represented Herrera’s brother, Raul Herrera, Sr, and three others claiming that Raul Herrera, who was murdered in 1984, had told them that he had killed Rucker and Carrisalez. This lead to the Supreme Court case Herrera v. Collins where the Court ruled that new evidence demonstrating innocence did not violate the Constitution’s 8th Amendment. Herrera’s death sentence with upheld and he was executed by lethal injection four months after the ruling. In his final statement he said: “I am innocent, innocent, innocent. . . . I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight.”