Corpus Christi Police Dept. / AFP - Getty Images file

Carlos DeLuna was executed in 1989 for a crime a Columbia University Law School team believes was committed by another man named Carlos.

This spring, the editorial board at the Columbia Human Rights Law Review dedicated its final issue of the year to one article about two men named Carlos. Carlos DeLuna, the authors believe, was executed in Texas for a crime committed by Carlos Hernandez, who looked so much like him that one of their sisters confused the two in a photograph.

"Los Tocayos Carlos," which runs 451 pages and is available for free online, details the stabbing death of Wanda Lopez, a 24-year-old assistant manager at a gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The article, which took six years, one professor and 12 students to produce, reads like a true-crime novel. It begins: “Wanda Lopez died at work at a Sigmor Shamrock gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas on February 4, 1983. She was twenty-four. Wanda’s only brother, Richard Vargas, heard her say her last words, but they gave him no solace or peace. They just made him angry.^”

There were two Carloses in the vicinity that night. An eye witness to the crime identified Carlos DeLuna as the man who had wrestled with Wanda Lopez, even though his clothes did not match the witness' original description.  

The law school team interviewed Carlos Hernandez's relatives, who revealed that on the day of the murder, before Carlos DeLuna was arrested, he told them that he had killed a woman named Wanda and that he felt badly about it. He said he didn't think he'd get caught.

Hernandez later told someone else that he had committed the murder and that "Carlos DeLuna took the fall."

Police told the Columbia investigators that Carlos DeLuna didn't have it in him to commit such a crime. DeLuna, a junior high drop out, had a low IQ and had been arrested for low-level crimes but was better known for huffing paint. Carlos Hernandez, by contrast, had raped children in the neighborhood and had been arrested for assaulting his wife with an ax handle, according to the Columbia University report.

Questioning how Carlos Hernandez, with his reputation, could have avoided scrutiny, the law school students and their professor discovered that Hernandez had been a police informant.

But not all police officers liked Carlos Hernandez -- their informants reported to them that Hernandez might have been to blame for other unsolved murders of Latina women.

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The law school team strongly suggests that the case, beginning with Wanda Lopez's call to 911, was sloppily handled. A novice dispatcher took too long to send out a patrol car to the gas station where Wanda Lopez was knifed; the crime scene was immediately cleaned; investigators relied on one eye witness account.   

Years down the road, the state assigned DeLuna an attorney who had never tried a major case in court, but who landed the job, the law school team suggests, because his father was politically connected.

In 1989, Carlos DeLuna was executed by lethal injection. His tocayo, or namesake, Carlos Hernandez, died in jail in 1999.

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In the introduction, the authors write: “Los Tocayos Carolos poignantly reveals how easily our legal system can fail to produce just outcomes even without the deliberate interference of individuals acting in bad faith and how the consequences of such failures can be irrevocable and at times, fatal.”

Columbia Law Professor James S. Liebman told the Guardian that what struck him most as he conducted his research was that the story was mundane.

"This wasn't the trial of OJ Simpson,” Liebman said. “It was an obscure case, the kind that could involve anybody. Maybe those are the cases where miscarriages of justice happen, the routine everyday cases where nobody thinks enough about the victim, let alone the defendant."

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The Columbia Human Rights Review piece recalls work by Northwestern University Professor David Protess and his students to exonerate innocent death row inmates. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on Illinois’ death penalty.

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By Pete Williams, NBC News justice correspondent

Is it legal for the federal government to kill a U.S. citizen overseas, someone who has never been charged or convicted of a crime?  Civil liberties groups are condemning the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, but many legal scholars say it is justified.

No U.S. court has ever weighed in on the question, because judges consider these sorts of issues exclusively matters for the president. 

Anwar al-Awlaki's father, Nasser, with the help of the ACLU, sued President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta a year ago, when it became clear that the U.S. was targeting  the younger al-Awlaki.  But U.S. District Judge John Bates threw the case out, ruling that federal courts were in no position to evaluate whether someone was a terrorist whose activities threatened national security and against whom the use of deadly force could be justified.

"This court recognizes the somewhat unsettling nature of its conclusion -- that there are circumstances in which the executive's unilateral decision to kill a U.S. citizen overseas is 'constitutionally committed to the political branches' and judicially unreviewable," Bates said, quoting an earlier decision on a similar issue.

The ACLU lawyer who handled the case, Jameel Jaffer, said Friday that the U.S. program that targeted al-Awlaki was a violation of both U.S. and international law.

"The government's authority to use lethal force against its own citizens should be limited to circumstances in which the threat to life is concrete, specific and imminent. It is a mistake to invest the president, any president, with the unreviewable power to kill any American whom he deems to present a threat to the country," Jaffer said.

But Kenneth Anderson, an international law scholar at American University's Washington College of Law, said U.S. citizens who take up arms with an enemy force have been considered legitimate targets through two world wars, even if they are outside what is traditionally considered the battlefield.

"Where hostiles go, there is the possibility of hostilities.  The U.S.  has never accepted the proposition that if you leave the active battlefield, suddenly you are no longer targetable," Anderson said.

In early 2010, the director of national intelligence, Dennis Blair, told a congressional hearing that the U.S. was prepared to kill Americans affiliated with al-Qaida, without mentioning al-Awlaki by name.

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"If we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that," by which he meant authority from the executive branch, not the courts.

Blair said the military and intelligence agencies had authority to kill U.S. citizens abroad who were engaged in terrorism if their activities threatened  Americans.  Since then, U.S. officials have said that al-Awlaki's role in al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) had shifted from propagandist to operational tactician and strategist.

The State Department's senior legal adviser, Harold Koh, plainly stated last year the Obama administration's view that it had authority to undertake drone attacks in countries where al-Qaida operatives were located.

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"The U.S. is in armed conflict with al-Qaida as well as the Taliban and associated forces in response to the horrific acts of 9-11 and may use force consistent with its right to self-defense under international law," Koh said in a speech to a Washington legal symposium.

Though he did not specifically address the issue of targeting Americans, many legal scholars believe his speech was an implicit statement that U.S. citizens could be legitimate targets.

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Robert Chesney, an expert on international law at the University of Texas School of Law, concluded in a recent law review article that al-Awlaki could be legally killed "if he is in fact an operational leader within AQAP, as this role would render him a functional combatant in an organized armed group."

Anderson, of American University's law school, said it's important to note that al-Awlaki was not targeted because of his role as an al-Qaida propagandist. 

"The U.S. is not justifying this on the basis that it's going after him for incitement. He was being targeted because he had gone operational," Anderson said, adding that he believed the killing was entirely legal. 

"My view of this targeted killing is straightforwardly, congratulations, Mr. President," he said.