Ivan Cantu was sentenced to death in 2001 for the murders of his cousin James Mosqueda and his cousin’s fiancée Amy Kitchen, but he has always maintained his innocence and now Kim Kardashian is fighting for his release
Kim Kardashian is fighting to save death row inmate Ivan Cantu after he was convicted for the murders of his cousin and his cousin’s fiancée.
Kim Kardashian has now become involved in the case ( Image: Getty Images)
Cantu has been on death row for more than two decades. He was sentenced to death in 2001 for the fatal shootings of James Mosqueda and Amy Kitchen, but has always maintained his innocence.
Amy and James were killed during a robbery at their home in North Dallas back in November 2000. Cantu has accused police officers of taking “witness statements and testimony at face value” and not properly investigating the claims. He alleges this led to “false and untruthful information” which culminated in his arrest.
Ivan Cantu was sentenced to death
(Image: Texas Department of Criminal Justice)
Investigators said they believed robbery was the motive for the killings. “Officers believe the crime occurred because robbery was the motive, the murders occurred during a robbery attempt, the car was taken, and some other items were also missing,” police told FOX 4 at the time.
At Cantu’s trial, prosecutors presented evidence of his fingerprints on the gun used in the murders, as well as bloody clothing seized from Cantu which had the victims’ DNA on it. However, true crime podcaster Matt Duff claims Cantu’s fiancée and the state’s star witness Amy Boettcher, who is now deceased, lied on the stand.
“Amy said Ivan had stolen James’s watch and then tossed it out the window,” Matt said during an episode of the Cousins by Blood podcast. The private investigator added: “Early in my investigation I discovered the Rolex. Although it was reported missing, it was later recovered at the house and given back to the family. So the family had that Rolex all along, but no one figured that out until 2019 when I started this case.”
Amy also claimed Cantu proposed to her using a diamond ring she alleges was taken from one of the victims. Witnesses have since come forward and said Amy and Cantu announced their engagement and shown off the ring a week before the murders.
Two jurors who originally voted to find Cantu murder have now come forward and said they don’t want him to be executed until new evidence can be reviewed. The Texas Criminal Court of Appeals could grant an evidentiary hearing, where Cantu’s lawyer could challenge the evidence presented in 2001.
The 50-year-old had been set for execution on April 26, 2023, but state District Judge Benjamin Smith in Collin County, where Cantu was convicted, withdrew the execution date and said more time was needed to review Cantu’s claims. However, his execution has now been rescheduled to February 28, 2024.
Kim Kardashian has now taken to Instagram to speak out about Cantu’s case. Posting on her Story, she wrote: “I heard about Ivan Cantu’s case from Sister Helen Prejean and was really moved by it. In 2001, Ivan was convicted of killing his cousin, James Mosqueda, and his fiancée, Amy Kitchen. Ivan has always maintained his innocence claiming that the rival drug dealer framed him for the murder.”
Explaining how her fans can help, the reality star added: “Texas now has a conviction integrity unity. The prosecutors offices are beginning to recognize that there are a lot of mistakes in convictions. They encourage you to write into their integrity units about specific cases, so I am encouraging everyone to write in about the case of Ivan Cantu. The time to act to save Ivan Cantu is now!”
The spiritual advisor for convicted hitman Kenneth Eugene Smith accompanied him into the chamber, where he witnessed what he called ‘the most horrific thing’ he’d ever seen done to another human
Smith – who survived a botched lethal injection attempt in 2022 – was accompanied to the gas chamber by his spiritual advisor, Reverend Dr Jeff Hood. Rev Hood described how he watched the 58-year-old killer writhe around like a “fish out of water” while his eyes bulged.
Here, in the reverend’s own words, he tells of his haunting, traumatising experience as he watched Smith die after anointing his head with holy oil.
I go into the execution chamber, and one of the first things that I realize was what the oxygen meters were saying. The oxygen meters, when I went in for orientation the other day, were at 22%, which makes sense because air is like 78% nitrogen. When I was going into the chamber, it was 25.4%, which means that they were pumping extra oxygen into the chamber — so that was kind of how they managed that.
“I immediately notice that Kenny has on a mask that extended from the top of his forehead to underneath his chin. It looked like a firefighter’s mask, and it was super tight. There were sorts of straps everywhere. It felt like I was looking at Bane from Batman. That’s what it felt like — it was a super gnarly, intense mask. There were strings going from the mask to the gurney.
“There were two corrections officers and a woman by the name of Cynthia Stewart Reilly, who is in charge of male prisons in Alabama. They were all sort of nonchalant-looking when all of this was happening.
Hood stands with Smith as the two pose for a final picture together before his execution
(Image: Courtesy o Rev. Dr. Jeff Hood)
“Kenny, of course, gave his last words. I was, the whole time, going back and forth with Kenny. I put my hand over my heart to let him know that I loved him. He was talking to me, letting me know that he loved me. It was really powerful. “At this point, the curtains were still shut, so the witnesses can’t see anything. As the curtains were opened, I was allowed to go up and make the sign of the cross on his leg. I did that, and he, again, repeatedly telling me how much he loved me and how thankful he was that I was there. Obviously, that was incredibly touching to me. “Then, he looked at the room where his family was. He kept telling them how much he loved them. He gave his last words, and then the execution started. “When the execution started, based on what the state said, I was expecting him to go unconscious in seconds. Well, as soon as the nitrogen hit, he began to convulse, and he didn’t stop convulsing for minutes. I know that by some accounts, it was two or three minutes.
He said the entire procedure lasted 22 minutes. That’s Lee Hedgepeth, who spoke at the press conference last night.
“It looked like a fish out of water. He kept heaving back and forth, back and forth. And the mask was tied to the gurney, and so every time he heaved forward, his face was hitting the front of the mask and pressing into the mask.
“His eyes started to bulge. He began to turn colors. He was spitting, and mucus was coming out of his mouth and his face. He kept almost hitting his face on the front of the mask.
“The mucus and saliva was hitting the front of the mask, and it was drizzling down the front of the mask. His whole body was seizing. It was absolutely, positively a horror show.
“It was so intense that the expressions of the corrections officers and Ms. Stewart Reilly dramatically changed from the nonchalant facial expressions that they had to real looks of concern.
Hood described the mask as being a tight fit, uncomfortably tight, and then said mucus and saliva from Smith coated the insides as he died
(Image: Getty Images)
“One of the reasons why I feel very comfortable calling Mr. Hamm [Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner John Hamm] a liar, calling the attorney general [Steve Marshall] a liar, is because they know, based on the reactions in that room, that this was not a success, this was not what they thought it would be, this is not something that happened in seconds. This was something that was torture, cruel and unusual punishment, for minutes and minutes.
“Cynthia Stewart Reilly, she had on women’s dress shoes, and she kept on tapping her feet out of nervousness. It was almost as if she was tap dancing in the execution chamber. It was one of the noises that I kept hearing was her tapping her feet.
“It was just an unbelievably intense situation. I was crying my eyeballs out. I had my hand on the space behind me. The longer it went, I kept thinking in my head, ‘How long is this going to last? How long are we going to have to watch this s**t?’
“On a personal level, I felt an unbelievable sense of guilt that there was nothing I could do to stop it. I felt like I needed to tell Kenny that I was sorry that I couldn’t stop it. I think that comes from a couple of spaces, but … as an activist, I felt guilty that I couldn’t stop it beforehand. In the chamber, I felt just completely powerless.
“Witnessing a murder, a horror show like that, it’s horrible. The tears were running down my face.
“When it finally became apparent that he at least appeared to be deceased, they were waiting on a flatline from the EKG. My face went from just complete sadness and horror to absolute rage that the state of Alabama thought that it was morally appropriate to suffocate someone to death, to torture someone to death, in that manner.
“The tube that was coming out of the control center was a very thin tube. It actually looks like something that would have come out of plastic plumbing that kind of extends, except it was clear. The more he heaved, and the more he looked like a fish out of water, swinging back and forth, the more I was concerned that that tube was going to bust, or at least break, so there was that concern for my safety.
“I kept on wringing my hands. I couldn’t figure out what to do with my hands. You know when you rub your hands so hard you feel like you’re going to rub your hands off when something horrible is happening like you’re going to lose a finger at any moment? All of this happens, and I am eventually escorted out of the chamber.
“The state of Alabama does not send a doctor into the chamber to declare a time of death in front of the witnesses because they’re scared that the doctor will be revealed. In this circumstance, I was taken out of the chamber, and the reason that’s so important is nobody knows the exact time of death. We just have to trust the commissioner to come out and say the time of death.
“This is a state that says, ‘Trust us,’ but they are consistently not being honest and not telling the truth. I think it is very possible — I’m not saying this for certain — I think it is very possible that we could have left that room and Kenny [would] still be alive. We would have never known. We would have no idea.
“All we could tell was it didn’t look like he was breathing. It looked like he was unconscious. But there was no way for us to know that because there was no doctor in the space. There was no doctor who came out and declared a time of death.
Then, what happens is I am escorted down the hallway. On my right, as I was walking down the hallway, I saw the doctor, and he was very shocked and upset that I saw him because he was trying to hide. And the reason he was trying to hide is because he could lose his medical license for participating in that.
“It just shows that there are so many secrets and so many crimes and so many just horrific things that happened last night, and I hope that the state of Alabama is held accountable for the horror that they perpetuated.
“These state officials are obviously chicken hawks. They are all about executions. They’re hawks on executions, making those things happen. But they are too chicken to be present, to take any sort of responsibility, for what’s happening. They’re not in the execution chamber. They are not pushing the mechanisms.
“They’re cowards. They are all about talking about these executions and how they want them to continue and all this kind of fluster, but they are too chicken to participate in them themselves. They sit up in Montgomery, and they talk about how it was successful and this and that, but they’re never there.
They’re forcing the corrections officers to do this stuff, and there’s no doubt from what I saw last night that it has an unbelievable, detrimental effect on them.
“I was a trauma chaplain for a while, so I’ve seen people [who went through] car accidents and burn victims. I’ve seen, unfortunately, all sorts of horrific things — [including] four executions last year. This is the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen done to a human being, by far.
This was, again, a fish out of water. It was someone heaving over and over and over again, and in a viewing chamber where there were state officials, corrections officers, people who could have stopped it. And it just kept going. It wouldn’t stop.
“To say that this was successful… It’s just insane that they keep on saying that. Nobody that saw that would say that was a success, unless you consider a success to just be killing somebody.
“If a success is something that doesn’t violate the Eighth Amendment, if a success is something that’s moral — if this is a success, then they have a very different understanding of morality, any of these things.”
Texas death row inmate Ivan Cantu is now facing his third scheduled execution date after the TexasCriminal 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.
When I was on death row, I saw guys come to prison sane and leave this world insane, talking nonsense on the execution gurney.
I am death row exoneree #138.
There are 12 more people like me from Texas. Twelve people who spent years of their lives locked alone in concrete cages waiting to die before they were set free, exonerated for their innocence.
When I was sentenced to death, I did not know that this sentence would also mean that I would have 12 years without any human contact, i.e. my mother, my son, my friends. All those people were stripped from my life because of this injustice. I did not know it would mean 12 years of having my meals slid through a small slot in a steel door like an animal. I did not know it would mean 12 years alone in a cage the size of a parking spot, sleeping on concrete steel bunk and alone for 22 to 24 hours a day. All for a crime I did not commit. The injustice.
For me and the 400 other prisoners on Texas’ death row while I was there, a death sentence meant a double punishment. We spent years locked alone in a tiny, concrete cage in solitary confinement, with guys going insane, dropping their appeals, doing everything they could to check out of this place before we were ever strapped to an execution gurney. All because of the conditions.
I am writing today because the ACLU has put out an important new paper about what it does to people to lock them alone in cages on death row. They found that over 93% of states lock away their death row prisoners for over 22 hours a day. Nearly a third of death row prisoners live in cages where their toilet is an arm’s length away from their bed. Sixty-percent of people on death row have no windows or natural light.
Solitary confinement is like living in a dark hole. People walk over the hole and you shout from the bottom, but nobody hears you. You start to play tricks with your mind just to survive. This is no way to live.
I saw the people living on death row fall apart. One guy suffered some of his last days smearing feces, lying naked in the recreation yard, and urinating on himself. I saw guys who dropped their appeals and elected to die because of the intolerable conditions. To sum it up, I saw a bunch of dead men walking because of the conditions that killed everything inside of them. And they were just waiting to lie down.
After I got out, I have tried to use my time to raise awareness about these conditions. I am currently working on a book and traveling the globe trying to share my message and educate people about the effects of solitary confinement. I have created AnthonyBelieves.com, which is my consulting firm that I use to help attorneys, nonprofit organizations, etc. I am asking for your support in my endeavors to bring attention to such inhumane issues by going to my website and ordering anything from my store to help offset my travel expenses. There’s also a petition on my webpage that I am asking 10 million people around the world to sign in solidarity with me as I stand up for justice.
Please help me and the ACLU get the word out about these conditions. Our death penalty system is broken in this country – it is applied unfairly against people. When you have a broken system, innocent people like me can end up on trial for their life. And subjecting anyone in prison to solitary confinement is torture. I am speaking on experience. Many of these same people are returning to our society, and when they do they come with all the baggage we put on them in the system. This keeps the rate of recidivism high.
In this country, we should be doing better than that. We should not have a criminal justice system turned into a criminal by the way we treat our citizens. Even when we do not like people or believe they have done something wrong, our emotions should not govern our society. We should be making laws from a rational perspective. We have to be above the criminal by keeping our system humane. Everyone should be treated like a human being. This is America.
Please share the new video I recorded for the ACLU to help get the word out about the double punishment of solitary confinement on death row. And make sure to read the ACLU’s new report. Also please check out AnthonyBelieves.com and give me your support while I cross the county and try to educate people about the inhumane treatment in our criminal justice system.
Thank you and best wishes.
For more on the double punishment of solitary confinement on death row, read the ACLU’s report A Death Before Dying.
A man is beginning his redemption Monday after serving two decades behind bars on a wrongful conviction.
Daniel Taylor endured 20 years of time in a prison cell knowing he didn’t commit the crime that got him there. He was a teenager when he went into the big house, but now, he’s a free 37-year-old who will move to a place he can really call home.
“Well, it feels like I’m finally getting established and stepping out on my own and finally getting a chance to get re-acclimated with society,” Taylor says. “It’s very bittersweet, but I’ll accept this over my alternative, which is an 8 by 2 cuz those are not 8 by 9 cells.”
Taylor spent just over 20 years in that 8-by-2 cell at the Menard Correctional Center. He was 17 years old when he was arrested and charged with double murder at a North Side apartment complex.
Taylor had an alibi when the murders were committed: he was already in jail for disorderly conduct and being held at another police station. That took a backseat in the investigation when Taylor confessed to the crime.
“I have never heard anyone who had the alibi that I had,” Taylor explains. “You have people who was at a football game—with their girlfriend making love but how many people have said I was actually in your custody and they went and got certain documents from their own police station. I was beaten and tricked.”
Taylor contacted the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwest University, shared his story and six years later, he had another court date.
“He was in custody at the time when the murders were committed. I had to take that case. He had no parents or lawyer with him when he was dealing with the police. people don’t realize that you can admit to something that you didn’t do.”
Now, Daniel and his brother are trying to do what’s right.
David was 16 years old when Chicago police arrested him in the middle of the night. It’s a night his brother David says he’ll never forget. He missed his big brother so much that he committed crimes to get arrested with hopes of getting assigned to the same jail cell as Daniel.
“By him being by my side and letting me know everything was going to be alright…and then, when that was taken away from me, it was like woah,” David says.
Both brothers want to keep at-risk kids out of trouble and out of jail.
“You need to really sit down and talk to your parents because when it’s all said and done, your parents are going to be the only ones you have if you end up in prison,” Daniel says.
While in prison, Daniel Taylor earned his GED and says he read the dictionary from cover to cover. He has now been free for six months, living in the two-bedroom apartment. Many people are rooting for him and a number of people are trying to help him find a job.
Today, in the United States, we celebrate freedom. At DPF, we are celebrating the freedom of exonerees like Obie Anthony, who spent 17 years in prison for a crime he did not commit.We also remember that there are thousands of other wrongfully convicted people, still sitting behind bars, trying to prove their innocence. We will keep fighting for their freedom, and for a criminal justice system that is more fair and just.
We hope you have a great Fourth of July, and thank you for joining us in the fight for justice!
Texas is preparing to execute Yokamon Hearn on July 18th. If his execution is carried out, he would become the 483rd person put to death since Texas resumed executions in 1982.
Yokamon Hearn was 19 years old when he and 3 other youths set out to steal a car. They ended up shooting and killing Frank Meziere, a 23-year-old stockbroker. All four defendants were charged with capital murder, but the other three plead guilty and received deals. One got life imprisonment, the other two got ten years for aggravated robbery.
Yokamon Hearn was a teenager at the time of his crime, but not a juvenile.Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of Child lays out the international standard for not executing juvenile offenders, defined as those who were under 18 at the time of the crime. (The U.S. is the only country except for Somalia that has not ratified this treaty.)
Likewise, Part III of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (to which the U.S. isa Party) also calls on states to prohibit the execution of offenders under 18. Upon ratification of the this treaty in 1992, the U.S. explicitly reserved for itself the right to ignore this provision and continue to kill these young offenders. But finally in 2005, with the Supreme Court decision in Roper v. Simmons, the U.S. put an end to executions of anyone under 18 at the time of the crime.
None of this helps Yokamon Hearn. Yet eighteen is an arbitrary age. There is no magic age at which one suddenly becomes a responsible adult, fully capable of making smart, informed decisions and not acting on impulse. Recent science tells us that brain development continues well into one’s 20′s, as does psychological and emotional maturation. 18 and 19 and 20 year-olds are not considered responsible enough decision makers to drink legally,yet they can be held fullyresponsible for their crimes and sentenced to the ultimate, irreversible punishment of death. On he one hand, we seek to protect our youth from their immaturity; on the other we punish (and even kill) them for it.
The fact that their development has not been fully realized also means that young offenders who may have carried out impulsive, thoughtless actions as teenagers are more likely than their adult counterparts to successfully change and redeem their past mistakes. Executing people for crimes committed when they were teenagers ignores the fact that, in prison, they can grow up and become productive, functioning members of society.
Despite extensive scientific evidence of the differences between youth and adults related to culpability, decision making, and susceptibility to peer pressure, U.S. states continue to execute people for crimes committed when they were teenagers. Since 1982 Texas alone has killed at least 70 people who were aged 17, 18 or 19 at the time of their crime. This practice needs to stop immediately.
There are many disturbing questions surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin, many of them outlined here. A rigorous independent investigation geared towards answering these questions and determining the extent to which George Zimmerman committed criminal acts is essential. But as rallies today by civil rights groups and others “demand justice” and call for Zimmerman’s “immediate arrest,” I want to urge caution.
I remain very uncomfortable with the demands and petition drivescalling for Zimmerman’s prosecution (not to mention the vigilante response) based only on the selected facts to which we, the public, have become privy.
There are very good reasons to doubt the good faith of local law enforcement and the prosecuting agencies in this case, and we should certainly be demanding justice. But we can’t know yet what a just response is. We should await the findings of the special prosecutor — which may very well spur more legitimate questions and demands — rather than rush to judgment now based on the limited information filtered down to us from the media.
Far more often than not, in the wake of a tragic death it is the suspicious-looking African American in the hoodie for whom there is this kind of clamor for “swift justice.”
Claim your Innocence 