Last effort to save Ivan Cantu's life in Texas gains support from Martin Sheen, Sister Prejean

In less than three weeks, the execution of Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu is scheduled, but not without a fight with the help of Martin Sheen and Sister Helen Prejean and the public policy advocacy group MoveOn.

Sister Prejean and Sheen held a press conference on Monday, Feb. 12, to raise public awareness and civil action to stop his execution. In recent weeks, their determination to reach out to the public and celebrities has produced 60,000 signatures, 4,000 letters and hundreds of calls to Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis for a call to hear new evidence and hold a new trial in Cantu's case.

“This execution is not signed, sealed, and delivered just yet,” Prejean said. “Even people that believe in the death penalty also believe in fairness, and that has not happened in Ivan’s case.”

Cantu was convicted in Collin County in 2001 for the murder of his cousin, James Mosqueda, and his cousin’s fiance, Amy Kitchen, in 2000. Cantu has maintained his innocence for 24 years.

Cantu is now facing his third execution date on Feb 28.

“Our goal is for Collin County to utilize the resources available within their department and take a look at the case,” Prejean explains. “The Collin County District Attorney Office has an Integrity Unit within its department. I want that department to honor the new facts in this case instead of putting him to death.”

Last April, when Cantu was facing his second execution date, his defense team filed a clemency petition. One of the issues the state argues is procedural in response to time limits.

In late August, the court ruled that the new evidence should have been included in Cantu’s 2004 habeas filing. However, the court would not award a new trial in his case because the new evidence did not meet the bar for a new trial and was not provided within the appropriate time frame.

However, the new evidence was unavailable in 2004.

Since 2004, one of the two-star witnesses that led to Cantu’s conviction recanted his testimony. The other has since died and has been proven to have lied during the trial. Both witnesses, who are siblings, struggled with heavy addiction issues and have proven to have lied during testimony with critical findings on the gun used during the crime and Cantu’s bloody clothes linking him to the murder, according to private investigator Matt Duff.

Duff created a podcast, “Cousin by Blood,” diving into all the new evidence and his findings within the case.

Three jurors during the trial have gone on record stating they would not have given Cantu the death sentence if they had seen all the evidence in the case.

“While Ivan’s situation is dire in response to his approaching execution, there are also more people involved,” Prejan explains, “The three jurors now have this execution on their conscience and made a decision without all facts, and that also matters because, in essence, they feel they were lied to.”

“The thing about the death penalty is it’s literally life or death,” Sheen said. “If anyone is willing to end a life, they look death right in the face, and it's a different experience than many understand and why many veterans from war struggle as they do.”

“I don’t think many people understand the death penalty because they have not witnessed an execution first hand,” Prejean added. “What the eyes don’t see, the heart can't feel.”

The advocacy group and Sister Helen Prejean and others plan to hold a press conference on Feb. 22 at the Collin County courthouse to ask state leaders to give Cantu a fair hearing before killing him.

Source: myjournalcourier.com, Robin Bradshaw, February 12, 2024

_____________________________________________________________________

Twitter/X | Facebook | Telegram | Contact Us

SUPPORT DEATH PENALTY NEWS

Buy Me a Coffee!

Tennessee | Questions Raised About the Doctor Who Was Overseeing Tony Caruthers’ Execution

Mark Fowler, according to a deposition, had not placed a central line in a patient for more than a decade when he attempted to put one in Carruthers Around 11 a.m. Thursday morning in the execution chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, a medical doctor stepped in and attempted to place a central IV line in Tony Carruthers’ chest. By that point, the prison staff had spent some 30 minutes trying unsuccessfully to insert a backup IV line that would allow them to proceed with the lethal injection. According to Carruthers’ attorney Maria DeLiberato, who was in the room, after asking a staff member to attempt inserting a line through Carruthers’ jugular vein, the doctor moved on to the central line, which is identified as the last resort in Tennessee’s lethal injection protocol .

Oklahoma | Richard Glossip on Life After Decades on Death Row

In an exclusive interview at home in Oklahoma City, Glossip describes his first days of freedom in a world he hasn’t experienced for nearly 30 years. For three decades, Richard Glossip lived on concrete. First at the Oklahoma County jail, after his arrest for murder in 1997, and then in the underground bunker housing death row inmates at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. As with the rest of his surroundings, he eventually got used to the hard, unforgiving floors, although recently he’d developed painful swelling in his legs.

China Executed 2,400 People in 2013, Dui Hua

A Chinese police officer lights a last cigarette for an inmate moments before his execution. The Dui Hua Foundation estimates that China executed approximately 2,400 people in 2013 and will execute roughly the same number of people in 2014. Annual declines in executions recorded in recent years are likely to be offset in 2014 by the use of capital punishment in anti-terrorism campaigns in Xinjiang and the anti-corruption campaign nationwide. Dui Hua bases its 2013 estimate on data points published in Southern Weekly that are consistent with information provided to Dui Hua by a judicial official earlier this year. The mainland magazine reported that a former senior judge of the Supreme People's Court (SPC) stated at a seminar in July that the number of executions had reached 1/10 of the highest number recorded since 1979. In 1983 - the 1st year of the Strike Hard campaign during which the power to approve capital punishment was given to provincial high courts - 2...

20 Minutes to Death: Witness to the Last Execution in France

The following document is a firsthand account of the final moments of Hamida Djandoubi, a convicted murderer executed by guillotine at Marseille’s Baumettes Prison on September 10, 1977. The record—dated September 9—was written by Monique Mabelly, a judge appointed by the state to witness the proceedings. Djandoubi’s execution would ultimately be the last carried out in France before capital punishment was abolished in 1981. At the time, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing—who had publicly voiced his "deep aversion to the death penalty" prior to his election—rejected Djandoubi’s appeal for clemency. Choosing to let "justice take its course," the President allowed the execution to proceed, just as he had in two previous cases during his term: Christian Ranucci , executed on July 28, 1976 and Jérôme Carrein , executed on June 23, 1977. Hamida Djandoubi , a Tunisian national, was sentenced to death for killing his former lover, Elisabeth Bousquet. He was execu...

New Mississippi billboard warns criminals: ‘Firing squad is legal’

DESOTO COUNTY, Miss. (WREG) — A billboard standing on Interstate 55 southbound as you cross the Tennessee state line and enter Mississippi from Memphis is sending a grim message to those coming into the state. DeSoto County District Attorney Matthew Barton recently announced the new billboard campaign, which features the sign reading, “WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI. WHERE THE FIRING SQUAD IS LEGAL. THINK TWICE.” It references Mississippi’s law permitting execution by firing squad under certain circumstances for inmates sentenced to death. Barton says this campaign is aimed at deterring violent crime and sends a direct message to criminals entering Mississippi.

EU GSP+ Reform: Will Brussels Finally Enforce Its Own Conditions on Pakistan?

The EU has tightened the rules governing GSP+ trade preferences, but Pakistan’s record raises a harder question: whether Brussels is prepared to suspend market access when a major beneficiary fails to demonstrate sustained compliance with human rights, labour and governance obligations. The European Union has formally adopted revised rules for its Generalised Scheme of Preferences, strengthening the conditions attached to preferential market access for developing countries. The new framework will apply from 1 January 2027 and is intended to tighten monitoring, widen the list of international conventions, and make suspension of benefits easier in cases of serious violations.

Iraq: German schoolgirl, 17, turned jihadi bride escapes death penalty and is jailed for six years

GERMAN Jihadi bride Linda Wenzel has been jailed for six years in Baghdad for her role as an Islamic enforcer with terror group ISIS. Wenzel, 17, who last year sobbed on TV “I have ruined my life,” could have faced the death penalty. German media reported that a German embassy representative in Iraq was in court yesterday to witness her sentencing. She received five years for joining IS and one year for entering Iraq illegally. Wenzel was found in the rubble of IS stronghold Mosul back in the summer of 2017. Charges were laid against her and three other German women captured with her. Schoolgirl Wenzel fled to Turkey then into Syria last year from her hometown of Pulsnitz in eastern Germany after being groomed online by a Chechen IS fighter who she married. He was killed in the savage fighting for Mosul while she was employed by the terror group enforcing the strict Islamic dress code on women in the city. She burst into tears after her capture and said s...

Iran executes Esma Zarei in Ardabil Prison after she gave birth in custody

Hengaw – Saturday, May 23, 2026. Iranian authorities have executed Esma Zarei, a 28-year-old Turkish woman from Parsabad in Ardabil Province, who had previously been sentenced to death on charges of “premeditated murder” in connection with the killing of her husband. She is the sixth woman executed in Iran since the beginning of 2026. According to information received by Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, Zarei was executed at dawn on Wednesday, May 20, 2026, in Ardabil Central Prison. She had been sentenced to qisas (retribution-in-kind) after being convicted of her husband’s murder.

US | Federal judge upholds constitutionality of nitrogen gas executions

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday ruled that execution by nitrogen gas does not violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, rejecting an Alabama inmate’s claim that it causes excessive suffering. The ruling came after the first bench trial in the country to examine the constitutionality of the execution method that has now been used to put eight people to death, seven in Alabama and one in Louisiana. The ruling clears the way for Alabama and other states to continue with the method and is a setback for critics who hoped a fuller examination of Alabama’s protocol would halt its use.

Florida: The Daily Routine of Death Row Inmates

The breakfast carts rattle through the concrete prison at about 5:30 am and as they approach Death Row the first sounds of morning repeat the last sounds of night - remote controlled locks clanging open and clunking closed, electric gates whirring, heavy metal doors crashing shut, voices wailing, klaxons blaring. A maximum security prison has no soft or delicate sounds. At the end of each corridor of death row cells a guard opens a heavy door of steel bars and a prison trusty pushes a breakfast cart inside. The door closes behind him and when it locks a second door opens and admits the trusty to the wing. He steers his cart along the wing stopping at each cell to pass a tray of powdered eggs and lukewarm grits through a small slot on the bars. Food is prepared by prison staff and transported in insulated carts to the cells. The food carts are full of cockroaches, the food is often undercooked or just rotten and is served on Styrofoam plates with a plastic "spork" - fork/spoon...

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog