A Bucks County jury convicted a man in a 2007 double murder

After deliberating for about eight hours over two days, a Bucks County jury convicted Alfonso Sanchez in a 2007 double murder and a related plot to kill a key witness to the crime.

He was found guilty of two counts of first-degree murder, as well as criminal solicitation to commit murder, conspiracy, witness intimidation, and related offenses.

Sanchez, 41, has been on death row since his 2008 conviction in the deaths of Mendez Thomas, 22, and Lisa Diaz, 27, inside a unit at the Bucks Landing apartments. But a prosecutorial error concerning DNA evidence led to a retrial for Sanchez, which took place last week before Bucks County Court Judge Alan Rubenstein.

On the night of the murders, prosecutors said, Sanchez went to the apartment under false pretenses: He told Thomas he wanted to buy marijuana from him, but in reality, he planned to attack him over an unspecified conflict.

Inside the apartment, Sanchez shot Thomas and Diaz at point-blank range, and wounded Thomas’ girlfriend, Jessica Carmona, as she attempted to shield her children from harm.

In emotional testimony during the trial, Carmona identified Sanchez as the shooter. On a 911 call, played in court, she was clear to dispatchers, saying: “His name is Alfonso.”

While in prison in 2021, Sanchez was recorded on phone calls soliciting his girlfriend’s help in hiring a gang member to kill Carmona, the prosecutions’ key witness at his then-upcoming trial.

Prosecutors, led by Bucks County District Attorney Matt Weintruab, seized on that as evidence of Sanchez’s consciousness of guilt, and urged jurors to convict him.

“Let’s put it simply: People who are innocent of murder don’t try to have living witnesses killed,” Weintraub said in his closing argument Friday afternoon.

However, Sanchez’s attorney, Frank Genovese, urged jurors to acquit him, saying the more likely culprit was Steven Miranda, who went with Sanchez to the apartment that night.

Genovese said Sanchez had no motive to harm Thomas or Diaz. But Miranda, he said, had dated Diaz, and had recently argued with her over whether she was pregnant with his child.

Additionally, Miranda’s DNA was found underneath Diaz’s fingernails, and Genovese suggested that indicated that she had tried to fight him off in the apartment.

Prosecutors dismissed that evidence as a “false flag” and urged jurors to weigh the other evidence that pointed to Sanchez as the killer.

Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty against Sanchez, and the trial now enters a new phase as they argue that he should be sentenced to death.