Texas | New Evidence Suggests Ivan Cantu’s Innocence, But Will Anyone Stop His Execution?

Sister Helen Prejean is trying to keep Texas from killing death row inmate Ivan Cantu. Prejean, the famed death penalty opponent, joined MoveOn.org in a virtual meeting last week to plead for a delay in Cantu’s execution, scheduled for Feb. 28.

“Even if you’re for the death penalty, you believe in fairness,” Prejean said. “There was no fairness at this trial. All we’re asking is to delay the execution of Ivan Cantu long enough to be able to have a hearing and an inquiry into the new evidence that’s been presented.”

The new evidence unearthed in Cantu’s case over the last several years has come from private investigator Matt Duff, who has tracked his work in his Cousins by Blood podcast. Duff has pieced together information demonstrating that key witnesses against Cantu – his former girlfriend Amy Boettcher and her brother Jeff – lied under oath at his murder trial. The evidence was persuasive enough that Collin County District Judge Benjamin Smith stopped Cantu’s execution in April of last year, one week before it was set to be carried out. He ordered the same thing that Prejean is asking for now – a hearing in court to examine the new evidence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Smith’s ruling last autumn, offering no explanation for its decision. No court has appraised the evidence, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

Cantu stood trial in 2001 for the murders of his cousin, James Mosqueda, and Mosqueda’s girlfriend, Amy Kitchen. According to court documents, Boettcher testified that Cantu left their apartment on the evening of Nov. 3, 2000, vowing to kill Mosqueda, and returned an hour later with blood-spattered pants and socks, which he placed in a kitchen trash can. She also said that Cantu threw a Rolex watch that he said he had taken from Mosqueda out of a car window as the couple drove to a Dallas nightclub after the murders.

But in 2020, Cantu’s attorneys presented testimony from a law enforcement officer who swore that she found no bloody clothes in Cantu’s kitchen trash can in a search conducted shortly after the murders, while Cantu and Boettcher were away – suggesting that Cantu may have been framed. They also submitted proof that the Rolex watch Boettcher claimed Cantu had thrown out of the car window had been discovered in Mosqueda’s home after the murders and returned to his family.

Jeff Boettcher testified at the murder trial that Cantu had told him in advance of his plan to kill Mosqueda. But after Amy Boettcher died in 2021, Jeff contacted the Collin County district attorney’s office and recanted his story in a videotaped confession, saying he lied on the witness stand. He expressed remorse that his testimony had helped put Cantu on death row.

MoveOn.org has collected 85,000 signatures asking for a halt of Cantu’s execution, an investigation into the case by the Collin County District Attorney’s Office, and a court hearing on the new evidence. Cantu’s attorney, Gena Bunn, has asked the CCA to reconsider its decision not to conduct a hearing. Kim Kardashian, Martin Sheen, Jane Fonda, and Mandy Patinkin have also requested a halt to the execution and Prejean is leading a rally on Feb. 22 at the Collin County courthouse to demand a hearing. She said that if the execution isn’t halted she’ll be at Cantu’s side as he dies.

“He’s asked me to be with him if they execute him, and to pray with him,” Prejean said. “But there’s no way I’m just going to be with this man and pray with him and ease him into eternity without doing everything I know to do to resist this death. Because there’s so many wrongs that have been done.”

Source: austinchronicle.com, Brant Bingamon, February 23, 2024

_____________________________________________________________________

Twitter/X | Facebook | Telegram | Contact Us

SUPPORT DEATH PENALTY NEWS

Buy Me a Coffee!

Florida executes Dominick Occhicone

Florida executes 2 men in a day. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis has made Florida's death chamber the nation’s busiest at the end of his final term. STARKE, Fla. — Florida on Tuesday became the first state in nearly a decade to carry out two executions in a single day, the last an 80-year-old man who was the second-oldest inmate known to receive a lethal injection in modern U.S. history. Hours earlier, the state executed a former police officer convicted of killing a young girl.

Two Executions In Six Hours: Florida Set For Historical Double Execution Tuesday

Florida is preparing to execute two death row inmates on Tuesday, July 28, in an action that would mark the state’s first double execution in more than 60 years. Former police officer James Duckett, 68, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at 12 p.m., followed six hours later by 80-year-old Dominick Occhicone at 6 p.m. If carried out, these will mark the 39th and 40th executions under Gov. Ron DeSantis and the 11th and 12th in the state since the beginning of 2026. In response, Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (FADP) has launched petition and letter-writing efforts asking DeSantis to halt both procedures. The group has organized two public vigils outside Florida State Prison in Raiford, set for 11 a.m. and 5 p.m., contingent on whether stays are issued.

Florida | 49 years on death row, killer of Bonita Springs teen learns death date

A Fort Myers man on death row for nearly five decades learned his execution date as Gov. Ron DeSantis signed his order Thursday, July 30. Harold Gene Lucas, then 24, shot and killed his 16-year-old girlfriend, Anthia Jill Piper in Bonita Springs on August 14, 1976. Lucas was 24 when he was charged in Piper's shooting death at her parents' home on Aug. 14, 1976. The execution is set for Sept. 1 in a state that has accelerated its pace under DeSantis the past two years, with a record of 19 executions in 2025. Piper was shot seven times by Lucas, who claimed to be intoxicated.

Florida executes James Duckett

Double execution: 1st of 2 inmates is put to death in Florida Florida has executed James Duckett, a 68-year-old former cop convicted of killing an 11-year-old girl in 1987. The state is set to execute an 80-year-old man 6 hours later for a 1986 murder. Florida carried out the 1st double execution in more than 60 years, executing former police officer James Duckett and later scheduling the execution of 80‑year‑old Dominick Occhicone, amid Governor Ron DeSantis’s aggressive push to increase death penalties in the state. Florida has put to death the 1st of 2 inmates in the state's 1st double execution in more than 60 years amid an aggressive death penalty push by Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Florida | Former warden recalls botched electrocution that left him battling PTSD for 13 years and turned him into an abolitionist

Ron McAndrew anticipated it would be just another standard execution. He had been assigned to carry out the death of Cuban refugee Pedro Medina via electric chair within the confines of Florida State Prison. Fifteen years had passed since Medina's conviction for the murder of 52-year-old Dorothy James, and McAndrew's responsibility was to oversee the administration of lethal electrical currents to his brain. Having already supervised two previous executions using the identical procedure and raised in a community that strongly supported capital punishment, he expected a swift conclusion with justice delivered.

Iran erects iron gallows in Isfahan protest square

An iron gallows has been erected in an Isfahan square where protests erupted in January. Families of several of the 10 remaining prisoners sentenced to death have been summoned for farewell visits. An iron gallows erected in Ali-Khani Square in the central Iranian city of Isfahan has raised fears that the regime is preparing to publicly execute protesters arrested during nationwide demonstrations in January. Sources who spoke with Iran International said large numbers of security forces had been deployed in the area, while the families of several prisoners sentenced to death had been summoned to the prison for farewell visits.

North Korea | 'I was only 9': North Korean defector recalls childhood memory of public execution

Kim Eun-joo was 9 years old when her teacher stopped their lesson and told the class to follow her outside. The children were marched to a public execution ground in North Korea. “I would cry even when our family dog died,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But the first time I watched humans killing a human, I had no words for what I was feeling. It was the most brutal scene I have ever seen, in any movie or in real life.” The memory has stayed with her ever since. Now a human rights advocate after defecting from North Korea, Kim recently brought that childhood scene to the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where North Korea’s use of public executions and capital punishment was officially placed on the agenda for the first time.

USA | What happens in the final weeks before an execution? These reporters were inside the room.

The journalists behind ‘The Last 12 Weeks’ earned extraordinary access to a death penalty defense team—and faced difficult ethical choices Many defense lawyers are naturally cagey. They work in a pressure cooker, protecting their clients’ rights while fighting for the best possible outcome. And arguably, the stakes can’t get any higher than trying to save a client’s life. So no, defense lawyers don’t usually invite journalists into strategy meetings. But that’s what happened when Marshall Project reporter Maurice Chammah and Serial Productions senior producer Alvin Melathe spent the final few months before a Texas execution embedded with a capital defense team.

19 July 1943 | Auschwitz's Largest Public Hanging: 12 Polish Prisoners Executed in Escape Reprisal

OSWIECIM, Poland — The SS carried out the largest public hanging in Auschwitz history on July 19, 1943, executing 12 Polish prisoners before other inmates as collective punishment for escapes and civilian contacts. The victims, all from the camp’s surveyors’ labor unit, were hanged on gallows built in front of the camp kitchen during an Auschwitz I roll call. The SS orchestrated this reprisal following prisoner escapes from the surveyors’ detail and unauthorized communication between inmates and civilians. Camp authorities used the recent escapes as a pretext to impose collective punishment.

Idaho | How Bryan Kohberger’s Guilty Plea Move Could Be His Death Sentence

If Bryan Kohberger successfully withdraws his guilty plea and goes to trial for the murders of four University of Idaho students, it could lead to him being sentenced to death, experts told Newsweek . Kohberger, 31, filed a handwritten petition on Monday from the Idaho Maximum Security Penitentiary, where he is serving four consecutive life sentences for the murders of Kaylee Goncalves, Ethan Chapin, Xana Kernodle and Madison Mogen in a rental home near the university's campus in Moscow, Idaho, in 2022. Kohberger pleaded guilty to the fatal stabbings just over a year ago, a month before jury selection was set to start.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog