kept showing me photo lineups and i said, it wasn t him. he is not in here. they said, yes, he was. they kept telling me they knew that it was him. i knew in my heart it wasn t him. but i was pressured and pressured all the time. so i used the name ruben cantu. in addition to not speaking english, juan moreno was an illegal immigrant. the fact is that he was in the country illegally. he was apparently concerned as anyone would be about deportation. so to claim that he felt pressure is entirely credible. richard now felt certain that san antonio police had pressured juan moreno into fingering the wrong man. but after seeing how the texas courts had handled ruben s case, richard turned to investigative reporter lisa olsen for help. lisa reported on crime and corruption at the houston chronicle.
i had no way of anticipating his reaction, whether it was outrage, whether it was anger, whether it was i don t believe it, it s all [ bleep ]. i was ready for just about anything. when i was contacted by lise olsen, whom i did not know, i had no idea that there had ever been a question about the result in the cantu case or that anybody was looking at it for that matter. i met with him in his office in a quiet room. we spent an hour. i took him through it step by step slowly. i showed him the fact that juan moreno had said that he had never believed that ruben cantu was the shooter. that he felt that he had to identify cantu because that s who police wanted him to identify. lise had also uncovered information about officers bill ewell and joe de la luz, who both had a vested interest in fingering ruben cantu as the killer. both bill ewell and joe de la luz had a history of disciplinary problems. bill ewell said to me that the
i got a tip from one of my death penalty source that s a private detective, who i later learned was richard reyna, had interviewed this eyewitness and that he had recanted. i was very skeptical because there are a lot of people on death row that have innocence claims and often they re fabricated claims. it is very unusual for a case to rest on such limited evidence. but with someone in texas sentenced to death based on the wrong information. lise would begin investigating ruben s story, and in the process come face to face with the man who sent ruben to death row, sam millsap.
my brother, ruben, felt threatened. he shot the officer, not knowing he was an off-duty officer. officer de la luz, who was shot four times, would survive. but after ruben was arrested, police realized they had a problem. the fact of the matter is, ruben was never prosecuted in that bar fight where he shot a police officer. there was no case that could be made against ruben, which implies that joe de la luz drew his gun on ruben before ruben fired. otherwise, why wouldn t they have prosecuted ruben cantu for attempting to kill a police officer? rather than letting ruben go, sergeant bill ewell, who supervised homicides for the san antonio p.d., had another idea. the gomez murder had gone unsolved for four months. bill ewell was a friend of
but in appeal after appeal ruben s case was denied in both texas and federal courts. do you feel like anyone is taking your issue seriously? absolutely not. i would get more review on a car theft case than i would on a capital murder case in texas. ruben s lawyer felt the case against him was weak because the only evidence was juan moreno s testimony. and that was it. there was no other evidence in the case. no circumstantial evidence, no physical evidence, no firearm, no nothing. and that was the entirety of the state s case on a 17-year-old boy. but lack of evidence was not sufficient grounds to win an appeal. on appeal, guilt or innocence is never the issue. what our constitution promises every criminal defendant is a fair trial. and because the trial was so clean, there was no basis, no