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.

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On February 7th, my group mates and I had a zoom interview with Amy Donella, a criminal justice lawyer. She has been in this profession for about 40 years, but has been working in her current company for 4. She gave us a lot of information about discrimination about the incarceration system.

There was one case she told us about that taught about false witness. It involved a man named William who was shot and killed; the shooter ran off. No one could really see him, but the witnesses said that he was dark skinned and 6 feet tall. One piece of evidence that the police found was a cap near the crime scene. They used forensics and found that the sweat on the cap was traced back to two different people. However, they assumed that it belonged to the person with more sweat on it. That person was innocent. Ava helped them get exonerated. In the end, they found the real culprit, and he was light skinned and 5 feet, which was VERY different than what the witnesses had said. This shows how you can’t always depend on people who claim that they witnessed something.

Ava went on to talk about some more general information about the death penalty in the U.S. For example, she told us that America is one of the only countries in the world that still use the death penalty, alongside Japan, China, and other Middle Eastern countries. There are also hundreds of people every year that are exonerated after cases that were unconstitutional. We asked her what communities are affected the most by false imprisonment, and she said that the Black community is the most affected. Recent studies have shown that most prosecutors will seek the death penalty more often when when the defendant is black than any other race.

Overall, I learned a lot from my interview, and I’m looking forward to having more meetings with her.

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On January 29, I had a zoom interview with Lauren Roberts, a lawyer from California who works to get people out of death penalty. Lauren has been working for almost 8 years at an organization funded by the state. She told me about what she does, and her experience from working with many clients. For example, there was one client she had named “Bill” (the real name is classified). He’s now in his 40s, and was arrested when he was 19 for a car robbery that went wrong and killed a woman. While he was the one who planned it, he took no part in actually committing the crime. Lauren did manage to get him out of death row. There are other types of cases where her clients claim that they are innocent, but the most that they usually get is a reduction of their sentence. Lauren has only had 2 cases where her clients were found factually innocent.

During the interview, Lauren also gave me a lot of facts about incarceration in general. Some things I learned was that California has the most people on death row today. However, no one’s been executed since 2006. There are other countries that do execute people regularly such as Texas, Florida, and Missouri. I also learned that the majority of prisoners in the U.S. are Black/Latinx men. Shockingly, the majority of people on death row in the U.S are white men.

I also asked Lauren about what people are trying to do to remove injustice in the court system. One thing she told me about is the Racial Justice Act. It was passed in 2020, and its purpose is to prohibit racial bias in leasing and jury trials. Another law was passed called Elder Parole, where incarcerated people over 50 who have been in prison for over 20 years can automatically be put on Parole. Overall, I learned a lot of important things from my interview, and it was fun talking with Lauren.

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On January 18, 2025, my groupmates and I had a zoom interview with Louise Normand, a member of the Death Penalty Project located in London. She is a lawyer who works to take her clients out of death row, and has been in this job for at least 30 years. We asked her questions about what kind of work she does, and what communities are the most affected by the death penalty.

We learned that the Death Penalty Project is an organization that mainly focuses on getting people out of death row and provides free legal representation. It was founded in 1992, and has been thriving ever since. The organization has capacity building and training programs for lawyers who work there. They also publish articles and have debates on different cases. Normand told us that recently they’d been working on abolishing the death penalty in Zimbabwe, and they were successful.

Normand also told us about how false imprisonment has a lot to do with the death penalty being popular in some countries. For example, though she didn’t have any information on the U.S., she did talk a lot about the death penalty in other places in the world, such as Asia. Normand told us about how clients from there often come from vulnerable backgrounds. Based on her experiences, drug trafficking was criminalized a lot and the associates are targeted with the death penalty, but not the actual people behind it. This shows how people who come from poor communities are often susceptible to be exploited.

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On Jan 24, 2025, on a field trip to the MCNY. Our main focus was on an exhibit about activism in New York. I saw and heard about a lot of different protests and movements, some that I’ve never even heard of before. My favorite was about a group called the Young Lords Organization. It was founded in the 1960’s by African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and other Latinx people in New York who demanded better equity and funding for neighborhoods like East Harlem and South Bronx. One of their most famous protests happened in 1969, when they blocked traffic on 110th street with piles of garbage to protest against inadequate sanitation. Overall, going to the MCNY was very educational, and it caused me to think more about my own CAP topic.

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