Name: Abigail (Gail) Pena

Social Justice Group: Prisons: The Death Penalty (C)

Date of Fieldwork: February 3, 2025

Name of Organization and person (people) with whom you met and their title(s):The Phantom Documentary

What I did and what I learned about my topic, activism, social justice work or civil and human rights work from this fieldwork:

On February 3, We watched an important documentary called The Phantom. It spotlights a case that was very significant in the world of criminal justice. The case surrounded a woman named Wanda Lopez, who was murdered in a convenience store in the middle of the night in 1983. The witnesses described the murderer as a Hispanic man. The police investigated and found a suspect named Carlos DeLuna. However, the man was innocent. Throughout his trial, he kept trying to tell the judge that it wasn’t him, but another person, Carlos Hernandez. Nobody had even considered this until much later after he got executed.

The documentary also focused on different people who had worked on that case, and their points of view. One thing that stood out was when Rene Rodriguez, the attorney for Wanda Lopez’s family was getting interviewed, and he said that “all these poor people, they were all getting found guilty, they were all going to death row, and nobody represented them”. This shows how most people from poor backgrounds got poorly represented, and no one really cared enough about them to do anything about it. Rene Rodriguez expressed regret when he recalled the case.