November 23, 2005 5:52 AM

Twelve years too late, and a man's life short

San Antonio DA to probe questions over ‘93 execution

It appears that Ruben Cantu is finally getting his 15 minutes. It’s just too bad that the state of Texas murdered executed him in 1993 for a murder that it appears he didn’t commit after all. OOPS…OUR BAD….

Now the Bexar County DA has jumped into the fray. Susan Reed wants to know what happened and why. Of course, Reed’s inquiry isn’t going to be able to give Aurelia Cantu her son back. It may shed some light on what went wrong and who cut corners in order to get the result they so desperately wanted. It may even provide some indication of whether anyone involved in the process of murdering executing Cantu is criminally culpable. At the very least, Reed’s inquiry will likely demonstrate what can happen when politically-conscious hacks decide that it’s acceptable to sacrifice a poor Hispanic male on the altar of their careers.

What Ruben Cantu couldn’t do during his life may be accomplished by his death. Cantu’s case has suddenly become the cause celebre of the moment for those of us who oppose the death penalty. The Houston Chronicle’s Rick Casey is now on the case:

Early Monday morning, Bexar County District Attorney Susan Reed told her staff to order up the archived files on Ruben Cantu.

She wants to see for herself whether evidence supports the allegations, detailed in stories Sunday and Monday by my colleague Lise Olsen, that the San Antonio man was executed for a murder he did not commit.

“I found the articles very troubling,” she said Monday. “I’ve always said it is not our goal that an innocent person will be punished.”

Reed is a tough and popular DA who rose through the ranks prosecuting murders and mayhem, then served 12 years as a district judge before being elected DA in 1998.

If you read Olsen’s stories about Ruben Cantu, you can understand why Reed found them troubling.

Cantu was executed in 1993 for murdering one man and shooting another at least nine times during a robbery.

But now a man who admits he was in on the robbery says Cantu wasn’t there. He has named the man who he says actually committed the murder.

There is only one question I’m looking to have answered here. Who will be held accountable? Who will be punished for this craven abuse of state power and political expedience? Perhaps it would be more accurately to ask if ANYONE will be held accountable? Yes, it’s 12 years after the fact, but there is no statute of limitations on murder in Texas…and if the facts as we understand them now are correct, isn’t that really what happened?

The district attorney at the time, Sam Millsap, says it was a mistake to seek the penalty on a crime with little evidence other than a single eyewitness.

Reed tends to agree.

“>I’m not sure a one-witness case is something we want to seek the death penalty with,” she said.

Reed is a prosecutor through and through. She is skeptical about recanted testimony.

“Why does someone wait until now to come forward and say, ‘I’ve perjured myself’?” she asked.

Still, she says she will examine the record in the case “to try to get my mind around it.”

And if she comes to believe Cantu was wrongly executed?

“It’s too early to play what-if,” she said.

Of course, Reed is going to be cautious. After all, taking on capital punishment in this state can be a recipe for career suicide. Reed no doubt is keenly aware of that, though I don’t doubt that she really does want to do the right thing.

Even if you support the death penalty, how can any reasonable person support a system that has the potential to execute the innocent simply because prosecutors wanted to score political points? What kind of society holds it within reason to accept a “margin for error” when you are hold an individual’s life in the balance? I’m not going to get drawn into a debate on the morality of the death penalty (though it should be no secret that I oppose it), but I do want to focus on a system that is so fraught with the potential for error.

If we are to hold ourselves to be a fair and just society, it would stand to reason that we cannot be OK with a system that may well on occasion execute an innocent person. That in this case Ruben Cantu was a poor Hispanic male without access to adequate representation only complicates this issue. What if Cantu had been a wealthy Caucasian male from River Oaks? Can anyone say with a straight face that the results would have been the same?

If Juan Moreno, the only eyewitness to the crime, is to be believed, the state of Texas murdered executed an innocent man in 1993. It would strain credibility to think that this case is the only time an innocent person has been executed. Given the state’s working-at-full-capacity execution mill in Huntsville, no one can state with any degree of certainty that Ruben Cantu is the only innocent man to ever have been put to death in Texas- and what kind of public morality is OK with the occasional execution of an innocent man?

WE DESERVE BETTER. Ruben Cantu deserved better. Aurelia Cantu deserved better. Texas deserves better. Pardon my cynicism, though, but I find it difficult to believe that in the end anything will change. Capital punishment gives Texas politicians the opportunity to pat themselves on the back while they flout their tough anti-crime stances. That the occasional innocent man or woman may be executed now and again seems to be considered little more than a cost of doing business. After all, who’s going to miss a poor African-American or Hispanic male?

What happened to Ruben Cantu is just plain wrong, and someone needs to be held accountable. Ultimately, though, it is very likely that absolutely nothing will change. After all, how do you punish the state when it is the murderer and ALL of us are responsible?

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on November 23, 2005 5:52 AM.

Oops.... was the previous entry in this blog.

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