News and Developments 2005: Innocence

Rob Warden, Executive Director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University School of Law, has written a book about one of the first accounts of a death penalty exoneration in the U.S.  Wilkie Collins, a British author, had written a novel entitled "The Dead Alive" about the convictions and death sentences of Jesse and Stephen Boorn for a murder committed in 1819.  They were later exonerated.  Warden's book is entitled "Wilkie Collins's The Dead Alive: The Novel, the Case, and Wrongful Convictions" and he provides examples of other mistakes in capital cases.  Scott Turow wrote the Foreward for this new book. 

Former San Antonio District Attorney Sam Millsap, who once proclaimed himself a "lifelong supporter of the death penalty," now opposes capital punishment. Millsap says his decision to oppose the death penalty was recently affirmed as evidence surfaced that Texas may have killed an innocent man when it executed Ruben Cantu, a San Antonio man who was sentenced to die while Millsap was DA.

"It is troubling to me personally. No decision is more frightening than seeking the death penalty. We owe ourselves certainty on it," Millsap stated in an interview during which he used words like "painful," "horrible," and "haunting" to categorize Cantu's case. Millsap said that he used to have confidence in the death penalty "when I was in my 30s and knew everything." Now, he says the revelations about Cantu's case are painful to him because the case happened on his watch. He said that if Cantu was innocent, that means the person who committed the murder remains free and that "the misconduct by police officers could be addressed today."

"It's horrible when you find out you participated in what ended up being a bad result, especially when a death is involved," Millsap noted.

As evidence surfaces that Texas may have killed an innocent man when it executed Ruben Cantu in 1993, recent editorials by the Austin American-Statesman and the Dallas Morning News have criticized Texas' death penalty and called on the state to take a closer look at its "flawed" capital punishment system.

The Austin American-Stateman wrote:

We all should remember (Ruben) Cantu's case and the lessons it offers as the country carries out its 1000th execution since 1976 scheduled for today in North Carolina. It now appears that Cantu was right. That means that Texas executed an innocent person. He was 17 at the time of the crime.

Cantu's case should shock even hard-core death penalty opponents. Cantu was no saint. He tangled with the criminal justice system from a young age. But he apparently didn't rob and shoot Pedro Gomez to death in 1984. Yet in 1993, Cantu was strapped to a gurney and injected with lethal drugs for that crime.

Texas' system is barbarous. What else can be said of a system that fails to sort the innocent from the guilty? What else can be said of a system whose checks and balances focus almost exclusively on whether the process was followed and deadlines met rather than the more important — and moral — questions of innocence and fairness?

A two-part investigative series by the Houston Chronicle casts serious doubt on the guilt of a Texas man who was executed in 1993.  Ruben Cantu had persistently proclaimed his innocence and was only 17 when he was charged with capital murder for the shooting death of a San Antonio man during an attempted robbery. Now, the prosecutor and the jury forewoman have expressed doubts about the case.   Moreover, both a key eyewitness in the state's case against Cantu and Cantu's co-defendant have come forward to say that Texas executed an innocent man.

Juan Moreno, who was wounded during the attempted robbery and was a key eyewitness in the case against Cantu, now says that it was not Cantu who shot him and that he only identified Cantu as the shooter because he felt pressured and was afraid of the authorities. Moreno said that he twice told police that Cantu was not his assailant, but that the authorities continued to pressure him to identify Cantu as the shooter after Cantu was involved in an unrelated wounding of a police officer. "The police were sure it was (Cantu) because he had hurt a police officer. They told me they were certain it was him, and that's why I testified. . . . That was bad to blame someone that was not there," Moreno told the Chronicle.