Friday, March 01, 2024 – A Texas man accused of shooting two people including his cousin dead, has been executed by lethal injection.
Ivan Cantu, 50, received a lethal injection and was
pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m. at the state penitentiary in Huntsville on
Wednesday, February 28, for the November 2000 fatal shooting of his
cousin, James Mosqueda, 27, and his cousin’s girlfriend, Amy Kitchen, 22.
In final words from the execution chamber, the 50-year-old
inmate said several times that he was innocent.
“I want you to know that I never killed James and Amy,” he
told relatives and a friend of Kitchen who stood feet away from him while
watching through a window. “And if I did, if I knew who did, you would’ve been
the first to know any information.”
He said he wanted them to know he didn’t think his death
“will bring you closure. If it does, if this is what it takes or have any
reservations off in your mind, then so be it.”
Prosecutors had said Cantu killed Mosqueda, who dealt
illegal drugs, and Kitchen as he tried to steal cocaine, marijuana, and cash
from his cousin’s north Dallas home. The inmate, who was convicted in 2001, had
long claimed a rival drug dealer killed his cousin in a dispute over money.
Before his statement, his spiritual adviser, Helen Prejean,
held in her hand his right hand that was strapped to the death chamber gurney,
and prayed quietly over him. He thanked friends and supporters and urged that
his case continue to be investigated to prove, “I don’t belong on this gurney.”
As a lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began
flowing, he began snoring. After the eighth snore, which was accompanied by a
gasp, he stopped all movement. Twenty-one minutes after the drugs started, he
was pronounced dead.
Cantu’s was the first execution in Texas this year and one
of two scheduled Wednesday in the U.S. Hours earlier, Idaho authorities halted
the execution of serial killer Thomas Eugene Creech after a medical team
repeatedly failed to find a vein to insert an IV line needed to administer a
lethal injection. Creech was condemned for killing a fellow prisoner with a
battery-filled sock in 1981.
The Texas execution proceeded hours after Cantu’s attorney,
Gena Bunn, said she would not make a final appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court for
lack of “a viable path” for the high court’s consideration of the case.
Two lower courts on Tuesday denied Cantu’s request to
intervene. And on Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted 7-0
against commuting Cantu’s death sentence to a lesser penalty. Efforts to delay
Cantu’s execution had received the support of faith leaders, celebrities such
as Kim Kardashian and actor Martin Sheen, and U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, and his
brother, former U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro.
Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis, whose office
convicted Cantu, said that evidence presented at trial proved Cantu committed
the killings.
“I remain fully convinced that Ivan Cantu brutally murdered
two innocent victims in 2000,” Willis said in a recent statement.
But Bunn had written in Cantu’s clemency application that
new evidence “impugns the integrity of the State’s case for guilt and raises
the specter that the State of Texas could execute an innocent man.”
In Cantu’s apartment, police found bloody jeans with the
victims’ DNA and a key to the victims’ home. Police found Cantu’s gun at his
ex-girlfriend’s home. Mosqueda’s blood was found on the gun’s barrel while
Cantu’s fingerprints were found on the gun’s magazine.
In a 2005 affidavit, Matthew Goeller, one of Cantu’s trial
attorneys, said Cantu admitted to him “he had indeed killed Mosqueda for
‘ripping him off’ on a drug deal” and that Kitchen was killed because she was a
witness.
Cantu’s then-girlfriend, Amy Boettcher, was the
prosecution’s main witness. Boettcher, who died in 2021, testified that Cantu
told her he was going to kill Mosqueda and Kitchen and later took her back to
the crime scene after the killings.
But Bunn alleged that Boettcher’s testimony was riddled with
false statements.
The defense attorney also said new witness statements also
helped confirm Cantu’s claim that a man who had supplied drugs to Mosqueda had
threatened the cousin days before the killings.
0 Comments