The author didn't tell me the grounds for her premise, but it arrived right after a column I had written about providing lawyers for poor people accused of crimes. A new study of DeLuna's case by the Columbia University Human Rights Law Review concluded that flawed police procedures led an eyewitness to identify the wrong man for a convenience store clerk's murder. [...] police brought DeLuna to the scene, handcuffed in the back of a squad car, and asked the witness if he could identify the young Hispanic man as the assailant. Columbia Law investigators discovered that a police informant named Carlos Hernandez, who would later die in jail, confessed to relatives on the day of the crime that he had killed a woman named Wanda (the store clerk's name). The bill was recommended by the Timothy Cole Innocence Commission, named for a Texas Tech University student who was convicted of a rape he did not commit and died in prison of an asthma attack before he was exonerated by DNA evidence. According to a 2009 policy, photo spreads are shown to witnesses. When LEMIT took testimony regarding its recommendations, Houston police Detective Mark Holloway argued there wasn't enough research to abandon photo spreads in favor of showing the photos sequentially (one-at-a-time) to witnesses.
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