Multiple eyewitnesses identified the murderer of Wanda Lopez, and his alibi story didn't quite check out.

20 years later, a team from Columbia University reinvestigated the case and showed the terrifying truth.

The state of Texas very likely executed an innocent man.

I'm Charlie and welcome to crime lines.

Hello and welcome to crime lines. If you've been a longtime Patreon supporter, you may recognize the intro to this case.

This is one I pulled out of the Patreon Paywall Vault to put out for everyone, because this is a topic that I actually care quite a bit about. Because of that,

I went ahead and redid this entire episode, which included redoing much of the research.

There were some errors in the older episode due to incomplete information and my attempts to

condense it down. So hopefully this one is going to be a lot better with more accurate

information, and it is about twice the length of the old episode, so it will also be clearer and

a lot more laid out. And because I don't believe that this case could be split really evenly in a cohesive manner,

like partway through for a two-parter, I'm just going to do the whole thing in one go and

it'll come out whenever I am done with it rather than trying to split up the work and

split up the episode. I want to present this as cohesively as

possible. This case is not what we would call unsolved because legally it's fully resolved and

nothing that happens going forward will ever change the outcome. Even if they could prove

100% that the convicted person was innocent,

the other suspect is dead. So there's nothing to be done to get justice. What we get from

talking about this case is information on how things can go wrong in the justice system and what

reforms we need to make sure it doesn't

happen again. And this episode is about the highest stakes we have here in the United States

when we're talking about the criminal justice system, and that is the death penalty.

...