Texas executes Peter Anthony Cantu

HUNTSVILLE, Texas — Texas on Tuesday executed the leader of a former gang of Houston teenagers who raped and murdered two young girls who were walking home from a neighborhood party 17 years ago.

Peter Anthony Cantu (left), 35, was strapped to a gurney in the Huntsville Unit prison death chamber and administered a lethal injection at 6:09 p.m. CDT. He was pronounced dead eight minutes later as relatives of his victims, Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena, looked stoically through a window a few feet from him.

Asked by the warden if he had any last statement, Cantu replied: "No."

He never looked at any of the witnesses, including his victims' parents.

Two of Cantu's fellow gang members were put to death earlier, Derrick O'Brien in 2006 and Jose Medellin in 2008. Two other members avoided the death chamber when the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed executing those who were under 18 at the time of their crime. A sixth person convicted in the case was 14 years old at the time of the attack and is serving a 40-year prison term, the maximum sentence for a juvenile in Texas.

Cantu declined to speak with reporters as his execution date neared. In recent years, he stayed clear of trouble and was classified among the best-behaving inmates on death row.

"He has matured remarkably," his appeals lawyer, Robin Norris, said. "He's a guy who fully accepts his responsibility."

"Nobody wants to hear that but it's the absolute truth," trial lawyer Robert Morrow, who remained in touch with Cantu over the years, said.

Trying to make it to Pena's home before an 11:30 p.m. curfew in June 1993, Jennifer, 14, and Elizabeth, 16, took a shortcut after leaving the party that led to a railroad bridge near where the gang members were hanging out drinking and initiating a new member. The group spotted the girls and grabbed Pena, who screamed. Ertman tried to help her friend.

What happened next was "a feeding frenzy," according to Donna Goode, a former Harris County assistant district attorney who was one of Cantu's prosecutors.

Cantu was the first of five to be tried, convicted and sentenced to die.

Speaking from the death chamber four years ago, O'Brien, 31, called his involvement in the murders "the worst mistake that I ever made in my whole life."

Medellin, 33, who was born in Mexico, similarly apologized before he was put to death.

Jennifer's father, Randy Ertman, who witnessed all three executions, said before Cantu was put to death Tuesday that the apologies meant nothing to him, that it was too late for apologies.

"It don't bother me a bit," he said of witnessing. "It's crazy. But you've got to be mentally prepared ... to get through it. Whatever you throw at me, I can take it. I have to think that way. It's hard but I can take it."

Ertman said if the death penalty was intended as a deterrent, all five members who had been sentenced to die should have been hanged from trees outside Houston City Hall years ago.

"That would be a deterrent," he said.

All of Cantu's appeals had been exhausted and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles rejected a plea to commute his sentence to life in prison.

Cantu's execution was the 16th this year in Texas, the nation's busiest death penalty state.

Source: AP, August 17, 2010

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