Chicago Tribute claims innocent man executed

As noted here, the Chicago Tribune has a three-part series in the works contending that Texas in 1989 executed Carlos De Luna for a crime he did not commit.  The first article in the series in now available here, and it starts this way:

For many years, few questioned whether Carlos De Luna deserved to die. His execution closed the book on the fatal stabbing of Wanda Lopez, a single mother and gas station clerk whose final, desperate screams were captured on a 911 tape. Arrested just blocks from the bloody crime scene, De Luna was swiftly convicted and sentenced to death -- even though the parolee proclaimed his innocence and identified another man as the killer.

But 16 years after De Luna died by lethal injection, the Tribune has uncovered evidence strongly suggesting that the acquaintance he named, Carlos Hernandez, was the one who killed Lopez in 1983. Ending years of silence, Hernandez's relatives and friends recounted how the violent felon repeatedly bragged that De Luna went to Death Row for a murder Hernandez committed.