On Monday, June 14, The Phantom, a new documentary detailing the wrongful conviction and execution of Carlos DeLuna, is premiering as part of the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. The film is based on The Wrong Carlos, a book that Great North Innocence Project staff attorney Andrew Markquart co-authored with Professor James Liebman and others while a student at Columbia Law School.

Carlos DeLuna was convicted for the 1983 stabbing murder of Wanda Lopez in Corpus Christi, Texas and was executed in 1989. When Andrew and his Columbia colleagues dug into the case years later, what they found was a case study in the many ways that a criminal case can go wrong. They ultimately developed overwhelming evidence that DeLuna was innocent and that another man, Carlos Hernandez, was the true killer.

DeLuna’s conviction rested largely on a single, cross-ethnic eye-witness identification made during a nighttime “show-up” identification at the scene of the crime. The police never conducted a lineup, let alone one subject to the kind of procedural safeguards that we were successful in seeing passed into law in Minnesota last year. Instead, after finding DeLuna nearby in suspicious circumstances, the police assumed they had their guy and developed the kind of tunnel vision that is all too common in cases of wrongful convictions. A cursory crime scene investigation left significant evidence unexamined, including a bloody shoe print from the perpetrator that did not match the shoes DeLuna was wearing. The authorities glossed over glaring problems with the case, including that DeLuna was found without a single speck of blood on his body or clothes despite what photos reveal to have been a horrifically bloody killing. The prosecutors, for their part, failed to turn over to the defense key evidence in the form of a tape recording of the police manhunt that showed the police were originally chasing one man (later revealed to be Carlos Hernandez) before abandoning him to arrest DeLuna. Then, when DeLuna, despite fearing the consequences for his own safety, said that Hernandez was the killer, the prosecutors told the jury that Hernandez was a “phantom.” They said so despite that one of the prosecutors had tried a high-profile murder case just a few years earlier in which Hernandez was a prime suspect. Andrew and his colleagues would later discover that this “phantom” had confessed to numerous people in the community that he, not DeLuna, had killed Wanda Lopez, and that rumors of such a confession even made their way to the police department. Throughout DeLuna’s ordeal, he received severely inadequate legal representation. On his last day, DeLuna suffered through a botched lethal injection in which the drug meant to render him unconscious and thus avoid the excruciating pain otherwise caused by the subsequent injections failed to perform its task.

The Phantom will be available for streaming through the Tribeca Film Festival website on June 14 before its theatrical release on July 2. Tickets are limited to 500 for online streaming, so get your tickets soon and consider hosting a watch party to experience it with a group! The film will be available for streaming on Netflix starting September 30.