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.  Scot

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.

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:

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.

More than 16 years after a Pennsylvania jury returned three death sentences against Harold Wilson (pictured), new DNA evidence has helped lead to his acquittal. Yesterday, Wilson became the nation’s 122nd person freed from death row according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC). During his 1989 capital trial, Wilson was prosecuted by former Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Jack McMahon, a man best known for his role in a training video that advised new Philadelphia prosecutors on how to use race in selecting death penalty juries.