January 11, 2024
Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu is now facing his third scheduled execution date after the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals denied him a new trial following his filing of a petition to present new evidence in his case.
Cantu has been on death row for over two decades for murdering his cousin, James Mosqueda, a known drug dealer, and his cousin’s fiance, Amy Kitchen, in 2000.
Since Cantu’s conviction in 2001, new information and holes in the state’s case raise questions of reasonable doubt, according to Matt Duff, a private investigator who has researched the case since 2019. The new developments in Cantu’s case included a trial witness recanting his testimony and a pair of jurors in his trial coming forward to express concerns about the conviction.
Duff documented his private investigation and created a lengthy, in-depth podcast titled “Cousins by Blood.” His work dives into Cantu’s case with first-hand interviews, including Cantu’s early jail tapes in 2000 and an interview with the state’s star witness that helped put him on death row.
Ivan Cantu has been given two prior execution dates, but both have been halted.
In 2022, after the DNA hearing concluded, Cantu received an execution date for April 2023. But Collin County District Judge Benjamin Smith withdrew that death warrant after Bunn filed her appeal outlining the new evidence.
Then, on August 23, a judge dismissed the new evidence for procedural reasons without considering the merit of her arguments.
This month, Bunn filed a new request with the court to reexamine the ballistic evidence in the case since Duff and other investigators have conducted their own ballistics experiments that cast more doubt on some of the police’s original conclusions.
To this day, Bunn doesn’t know if she has received everything related to Cantu’s case from the Collin County District Attorney’s Office and from the Dallas Police Department. Part of the issue is that 20 years have passed since the original trial, and many people currently working in those departments weren’t around then. Another issue was jurisdiction—Dallas police, then and now, don’t usually work with Collin County prosecutors—but the murders happened in a portion of North Dallas that extends into Collin County.
Winning post-conviction relief is extremely difficult in Texas, though not impossible: 464 people have been exonerated of various crimes here since 1989, according to the National Registry of Exonerations. About a third of those cases were overturned due to perjury or false accusations, according to the registry. Nearly one in five was due to inadequate legal defense.
Almost 70 exonerations were from Dallas County. But Cantu’s case was tried in Collin County, even though it was investigated by the Dallas Police Department. Since 1989, only four people sent to prison from Collin County have been exonerated.
The judge who presided over Cantu’s trial, Charles Sandoval, has since been heralded “the worst judge in Collin County”. Known as “Hang Them All Sandoval,” he lost his seat in 2008 after developing a reputation for cruelty and for making decisions based not on law but on courtroom favorites. One of the four recent Collin County exonerations was of former Judge Suzanne Wooten, who was convicted of bribery after successfully challenging Sandoval in a judicial campaign. That accusation came directly from Sandoval, but the charges were later overturned and discredited as a baseless vendetta.
On Valentine’s Day, Cantu will submit his paperwork to tell the prison system who he wants there on his execution day and what he wants the state to do with his body afterward. He’ll explain where he wants his few belongings and any money left in his account to go.
Sister Helen Prejean, author of the book Dead Man Walking, is acting as Cantu’s spiritual adviser. She’ll be there with Cantu during his execution if his date holds. But in the meantime, she is a fierce advocate for the date to be withdrawn.
“There’s no way I’m simply going to acquiesce, hold his hand, and pray him into eternity without doing every single thing I can to get the truth out so that Texas does not execute this man who very possibly might be innocent,” Prejean told
Prejean, along with Cantu’s other supporters, are calling on Collin County to again withdraw his death warrant. It’s one of many ongoing efforts to spare Cantu’s life—and to give him another day in court. Officials from the county did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
“If you want to execute me, that’s fine,” Cantu said over the closed-circuit phone in the Polunsky Unit. “Just give me a fair trial.”
“The criminal court of appeals deemed the claims in Ivan’s application were procedural barred, meaning it should have been included in Ivan’s 2004 habeas filing,” Duff said. “If the claims raised were based on a 2009 law (ex. Parte Chabot) and 2022 recant of a state’s star witness, that information was clearly unavailable in 2004.”
“The court’s ruling is unjust and needs to be overturned,” Duff added.
Cantu responded to the court’s decision on death row through the Texas Department of Criminal Justice email system.
“I’m disappointed with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals for not reviewing my case on the merits,” Cantu writes. “I’m entitled to a new trial according to state law precedent and the constitution of the United States.”
“Where is State Rep. Jeff Leach?” Cantu added. “Leach advocates for other death row inmates such as Melissa Lucio and Jeffery Wood, who are not even from Collin County. Why isn’t he advocating for the injustice occurring in his own backyard?”
Texas State Rep. Jeff Leach was contacted for comment by phone and via email on Friday, Sept. 1, and again on Monday, Sept. 5, and has yet to reply as of noon on Wednesday, Sept. 6.
Cantu’s execution date is scheduled for Feb. 28, 2024.
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