Posted on 12/01/2005 3:33:11 PM PST by Racehorse
As the 1993 execution of a San Antonio man comes under new scrutiny, Bexar County's district attorney raised the possibility Wednesday of prosecuting the only eyewitness in the case — the same person who recently came forward to say Texas executed an innocent man.
The witness, a Mexican national who was shot nine times on the same night his friend was murdered, told a jury in 1985 that Ruben Cantu was the killer.
Since then, he has recanted, telling the Houston Chronicle that detectives pressured him into picking the then-17-year-old Cantu out of a photo lineup and providing the key testimony that led to the conviction.
Juan Moreno's about-face has thrust San Antonio front and center into the debate over capital punishment and prompted prosecutors here to dust off an old file and consider whether it contains a grave mistake.
[. . .]
"Did someone commit perjury? That's a crime," Reed said. "Did their perjury lead to an execution, lead to someone's death? Those are criminal matters."
[. . .]
Then an undocumented immigrant, Moreno repeatedly failed to pick Cantu out of a photo lineup but changed stories months after the murder when detectives twice came back to him with similar lineups.
By then, Cantu had shot an off-duty police officer during a barroom squabble, reinvigorating investigators' interest in the murder of Moreno's friend.
"I felt a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure from the court, and I wanted to get out from under it all," Moreno said in Spanish.
(Excerpt) Read more at mysanantonio.com ...
But if Moreno's recantation is true, this is a pointed example why I believe criteria for use of the death penalty must be much stricter than it is now.
Kinda hard to make Cantu into a saintly martyr and a poster boy against the death penalty. This case is not the one that's going to bring down capital punishment.
In a strictly legal sense, Cantu's other acts don't matter, but in a moral sense, it's almost a certainty that Texas saved lives by executing this POS.
"Kinda hard to make Cantu into a saintly martyr and a poster boy against the death penalty."
Sam D. Millsap Jr., then the Bexar County district attorney who decided to charge Cantu with capital murder, told the newspaper he never should have sought the death penalty in a case based on testimony from an eyewitness who identified a suspect only after police showed him Cantu's photo three separate times.
I suppose that might have been what it was.
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