Death Row Stories (2014–…): Season 2, Episode 5 - Mother V. Texas - full transcript
On this episode
of Death Row Stories...
A brutal murder in Texas... He went crazy.
He started shooting all over the place.
Lands a 17-year-old offender
on death row.
Young people were
committing very adult crimes.
But with questionable evidence...
There's no guns. There's no blood,
DNA, nothing.
And a death sentence looming...
Execution was at midnight in those days.
A DA has doubts.
I was horrified by what I saw.
And a boy's life hangs in the balance.
Evil people are never going to change,
and they should be executed.
There's a body in the water.
He was butchered and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case,
there are a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
On the South Side of San Antonio, Texas,
late on a fall evening in 1984,
a murder was about to take place.
The neighborhood was very tough.
You know,
there are street gangs all over the place.
People talk about the Mexican Mafia.
In a small, half-built house
slept two construction workers,
19-year-old Juan Moreno
and 25-year-old Pedro Gomez.
They were spending the night there because,
I believe,
the owner of the house had
had a water heater stolen,
so he'd asked them to stay there
to protect his property
as he built his house.
But Juan and Pedro were about
to have unexpected company.
What happened that particular night...
These two decided to go into the house.
One of them sneaked in through a window,
opened the back door for the other guy,
and the other guy had a rifle.
The robbers turned on a light
and discovered Juan and
Pedro sleeping on the floor.
Juan Moreno was hit
on the head with the rifle.
The other guy wakes up,
and he had a gun underneath the pillow,
so reaches for it.
And when Pedro Gomez reached under there,
that's when the assailants
unloaded on the two of them.
The guy with the rifle, he just panicked,
and he just started shooting.
Juan and Pedro were each shot nine times.
The robbers took their
wallets and watches and fled,
leaving their victims for dead.
I think the number of shots
fired was pretty intensive.
Normally you shoot 'em
once or twice or whatever.
You get out of there.
But they were shot several times,
so it was a pretty vicious crime.
Pedro Gomez was shot in the head
and died instantly,
but Juan Moreno, despite his wounds,
managed to crawl to his
pickup truck and call for help.
Eventually taken to the hospital,
Juan lost a lung, a kidney,
and part of his stomach.
He was near death after the shooting.
I think it's almost a
miracle that he survived.
It's because of his age.
He was young and strong.
Juan, still struggling to survive,
told police his attackers had
been two Hispanic teenagers,
but that description matched
thousands of young men in the area.
San Antonio police canvassed
the South Side neighborhood,
but in an area dominated
by a ruthless street gang
with a strict code of silence,
the trail ran cold.
But three weeks after the murder,
rumors started swirling
at a local high school
that two teenagers...
David Garza, age 15,
and Ruben Cantu, age 17...
Had committed the crime.
Ruben had even bragged
about being the shooter.
People differ about whether Ruben himself
was part of a gang.
His older brothers were in gangs.
There were low-level pool halls.
There was drug dealing in the streets.
There was a car theft ring active
in that same neighborhood.
It was a tough place to grow up.
Four months after the shooting,
Juan Moreno,
still recovering from his wounds,
was shown a police photo
lineup with Ruben Cantu's picture.
Moreno identified Ruben
Cantu as the assailant.
He was charged with murder,
and the case was taken and accepted
by the District Attorney's office.
District Attorney Sam Millsap,
the youngest big-city DA in the country,
would now decide whether
to try 17-year-old Ruben Cantu
as an adult,
making him eligible for the death penalty.
We had very, very young people
who were committing very adult crimes,
very brutal crimes,
and I was moved by that.
The only thing that a prosecutor
could do in that situation,
because of the brutality of the crime,
was to prosecute it as a capital murder,
and I had a perfect record
in death penalty cases.
Ruben Cantu's trial began on July 22, 1985.
In court, the prosecution's star witness,
Juan Moreno,
described how Cantu shot
Pedro Gomez in the head,
then turned the rifle on him
and riddled his body with bullets.
Mr. Moreno was a very good witness.
He was very sympathetic.
I know, at one time,
he was asked to raise his shirt
and show the scars and the
wounds that he had received.
When the jury saw the scars,
that made a pretty big impression.
I also asked,
"Are you able to identify in court today
the man who shot and killed your friend?"
And he was able to say, "Yes, I see him.
He's sitting right there,"
and pointed to Mr. Cantu.
A jury decided very quickly too.
In just an hour and a half,
they ruled that Cantu
should die by lethal injection.
Cantu's family is stunned.
A supporter of Cantu
tried to block the camera
minutes after the jury
returned with its decision
that Cantu should be executed.
District Attorney Sam Millsap
agreed with the jury's verdict.
Ruben Cantu arguably
received a perfect trial.
I say that because he had a fair judge.
He had a very fine defense lawyer.
He had an ethical prosecutor.
And the jury made the only
decision that they could make
under the circumstances.
Ruben's accomplice,
a man named David Garza,
received 20 years.
Cantu was sent to solitary confinement
at the Huntsville State Penitentiary,
230 miles east of San Antonio.
From his cell, Ruben wrote a letter
addressed to the citizens of San Antonio.
This was a letter he wrote
not long after he was convicted.
It says, "My name is Ruben M. Cantu,
and I'm only 18 years old.
And I have been framed
in a capital murder case,
so I'm going to have to spend
the rest of my life in prison
or die by so-called lethal injection."
It's an angry letter.
He's outraged about what's happened to him,
but it's got some very,
very powerful charges in it.
For Sam Millsap,
the letter was just another
convict claiming innocence,
but as the years went by,
Millsap began to have doubts.
It never occurred to me
when I was 35 years old and I
was the smartest guy in the room
that the criminal justice system
could get it wrong in these cases.
If I could do it over again,
I never would've made the decision
to prosecute Ruben
Cantu for capital murder.
♪♪
In 1985,
Sam Millsap successfully sent
juvenile offender Ruben Cantu
to death row for the murder of Pedro Gomez.
It was not a difficult decision in 1985
to prosecute the case
as a capital murder case
because we had a survivor of a brutal crime
who was able to identify Cantu,
but there are things that I
know and understand today
that I didn't understand at that point.
Ruben came from South San Antonio
in what was a very tough neighborhood.
His parents split when he was a young kid,
and his mother left,
and he stayed with his father.
He was a pretty good older brother to me.
He would look out for me,
and everything was fine
up until this happened.
A cousin of mine called and
said that he had been on the news,
that he'd been arrested for murder.
I was just, like, devastated,
you know, in disbelief.
On death row,
Ruben wrote a letter claiming
he'd been framed by police.
That got the attention of the NAACP,
who hired Richard Reyna to investigate.
As a former cop,
Reyna had heard claims of innocence before.
Naturally not all the time
are you gonna run into
people that are innocent,
but what got my curiosity on this case is
that they didn't really have any evidence
connecting Ruben to that house.
No fingerprints, no physical evidence,
none whatsoever.
Richard also discovered that police
had only focused their attention on Ruben
after he was involved
in an unrelated crime.
I saw where Ruben had been
involved with a police officer
in a shootout at some bar
not pertaining to this murder.
I think Ruben was arrested
because of something that
happened after that murder.
He and a couple of his friends
were at a bar shooting pool,
and they had a conflict
with an off-duty officer.
He accidently hit him with a pool stick.
Words were exchanged.
The off-duty officer was Joe De La Luz,
a 16-year veteran of the force.
The officer... he showed him his weapons.
He was in regular civilian clothes,
so they didn't know.
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 PD,
had another idea.
The Gomez murder had
gone unsolved for four months.
Bill Ewell was a friend of Joe De La Luz,
the officer who was shot,
and he also ended up being the person
who was in charge of
this murder investigation.
So after the shooting
of Bill Ewell's friend,
Bill Ewell decides to take
another look at Ruben Cantu.
By now, Juan Moreno had twice failed
to identify Ruben Cantu as the shooter,
but with Ruben in custody,
Ewell sent a detective to Juan's home.
I took the photos, the forms,
and a portable typewriter.
I showed Juan this array.
He sat there, looked at 'em
and looked at 'em and looked at 'em,
and he shoved them aside
and looked away from them.
And he said, "Look, I know who did it.
I know who shot me,
so why do I have to identify anyone
out of this photo array?"
And so I said, "Well, who did it?"
He said, "Ruben Cantu."
Well, we went round and round,
and I could tell that the
guy was very scared,
and he didn't want to sign anything.
I think that he was afraid of retaliation.
He just would not do it,
so I folded up my
typewriter and bid farewell.
It didn't make any sense
to me that Juan Moreno
supposedly saw Ruben Cantu face to face,
inches apart when he was shot,
but they showed him at least
five or more photo lineups
with Ruben Cantu in these lineups,
and he still couldn't identify him.
Why is he not being identified?
Still unsatisfied,
police brought Juan Moreno to the station
and told him Ruben had
just shot a police officer.
This time, Moreno finally
picked Ruben out of a lineup.
Now they come back and say,
"He identified Ruben Cantu as the shooter,"
and that was it.
You know, and I said,
"No, that doesn't work."
You can see quickly that
there's a pattern there,
and it doesn't work.
Richard needed to speak with Juan himself.
After weeks of effort,
he finally tracked down Juan
and convinced him to
do a videotaped interview.
Reyna: The police say you were scared
when you saw the photograph
of the person who shot you?
Moreno: No, I was never scared.
Maybe it was from the pain,
from the anesthesia,
but I was never scared of the photographs.
Reyna: The police say you told them...
"The person who shot us
both is named Ruben Cantu."
Is that true?
Moreno: I could never tell them the name
because I didn't know the name.
Richard also asked Juan
about his statement fingering Cantu,
which was written in English.
Reyna: Do you understand
what this statement says?
Moreno: No, it's written in English
and I don't understand English.
Juan kept telling me,
"The police kept showing up,
and they kept showing me photo lineups,
and I said,
'It wasn't him. He's not in here.'
And 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.
And 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 Lise Olsen for help.
Lise reported on crime and corruption
at the Houston Chronicle.
I got a tip from one of
my death penalty sources
that 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 who have innocence claims,
and often, they're fabricated claims.
It is very unusual, though,
for a case to rest on
such limited evidence.
I thought,
"Was 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.
♪♪
By 1993, Ruben Cantu had spent eight years
in solitary confinement
while his appeals unfolded.
I just wanted him to get out.
You know, I would go there,
and I was scared.
You know, it's jail,
prison. I've never been locked up.
It was just scary. It was just terrifying.
He's only, like, 20-something,
and I was like, "Man, you know,
when he gets out, you know,
we're gonna go do this.
We're gonna go do that."
Ruben's appellate lawyer was determined
to get Ruben off death row,
but in appeal after appeal,
Ruben's case was denied in
both Texas and Federal courts.
Do you feel like anyone's
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 error that had been committed
during the course of the trial
that would've justified a reversal.
It was as clean as they come.
In a last-ditch effort,
Ruben's lawyer requested a hearing
in front of Judge Susan D. Reed,
a former prosecutor elected to the bench
on a strong law and order platform.
I have always believed that
the death penalty is
appropriate in certain cases.
I was not in the District Attorney's office
when it was being tried,
but I have no reason to
believe it wasn't a fair trial.
And I decided there was no
cause to do an evidentiary hearing.
Everything that you're saying,
the court's already
dealt with on your appeal,
and so after the appellate
courts have ruled,
you have to give them a date.
Susan Reed set an execution date
for August 24, 1993.
Ruben's last option was
to appeal for clemency,
but governors in Texas
had a notorious history
with the death penalty.
These hardened criminals
will never again murder,
rape, or deal drugs.
As governor, I made sure they received
the ultimate punishment... death.
And Texas is a safer place for it.
Your state has executed
234 death row inmates.
Have you...
Have you struggled to sleep at night?
No, sir,
I've never struggled with that at all.
Texans are hardwired to
support the death penalty.
There may be a gene
that is unique to people
who are born and live in Texas.
We are programmed to
believe that the death penalty
is a necessary part of
our criminal justice system.
We love a good execution.
Since 1976,
Texas has executed well over 500 people,
more than the next six states combined.
Since I've been governor,
we have put 45 people to death.
It is not something that
anybody wants to deal with,
but they won't commit another crime.
The governor during Ruben's clemency appeal
was the colorful leader of the
Texas Democrats, Ann Richards.
Poor George.
He was born with a
silver foot in his mouth.
In Texas, even liberal icon Ann Richards
would not dispute the death penalty.
On August 23, 1994,
the day before he was to be executed,
Ruben Cantu received the reply:
"Clemency denied."
A San Antonio man
continues to claim innocence
just hours before he is
set to die by lethal injection.
On the day of his scheduled execution,
local stations aired an
interview with Ruben,
where he again declared his innocence.
By law standards,
my case is barely legally sufficient...
To hold up a capital
murder conviction because
of the eyewitness.
Yet his testimony,
just looking at his testimony...
You don't know where he's coming from.
But in the death house at Huntsville,
where all Texas executions take place,
preparations for Ruben's
execution proceeded.
Execution was at midnight in those days.
Reverend Carroll Pickett
was chaplain
at the Huntsville prison for 16 years.
Ruben had been visiting
with his family most of that day.
They have different rooms,
and in each room, they have phones,
so all of us would be
on the phone with Ruben.
He was in a single cell.
Across from where he was
sitting was the death chamber.
He said that once that
medicine ran through his veins
and he shut his eyes,
that that's when he was
gonna grab God's hand,
and God was gonna take him.
Then I hear noise in the background,
and I ask him,
and he says they're
setting up the equipment.
And we're still waiting
for the lawyer to call,
hoping that it would stop.
And then I guess around 11:45,
they said that he had to leave.
It was time to go, and he started crying,
and he says, "Everything's gonna be okay."
And I was still hoping for that lawyer,
just waiting for that call.
♪♪
Ruben Cantu was scheduled to be executed
after midnight on August 24, 1993.
As the hour approached,
Ruben said good-bye to his family.
They told him it was time.
He just said, "I love y'all,
and, you know, everything's gonna be fine."
And they took him down the hallway,
and they changed... he
changed into a black outfit.
Didn't hear from him anymore.
He got down on the floor, and he prayed,
and he rose up and said,
"I'm not innocent of sin,
but I'm not guilty of this crime."
Right at 12:00, I said,
"You crawl up on the gurney."
He said, "Okay."
They strapped him down,
and he got nine straps on him.
And I put my hand on his shoulder
and said, "Okay, Ruben, are you ready?"
I said,
"Is there anything I can do for you now?"
He said, "No, everything's gonna be okay."
We were having a candlelight vigil,
and across the street from where we're at,
there's a lot of college students
that are having a big old party,
you know, "Kill him. Hang him."
Oh, you know, all this stuff.
You know, you're out there,
and you're looking at the clock,
and you can't do anything.
You're just helpless, powerless.
- What I told him to do is,
- you know, put his head back
And try to get all the
air out of your lungs,
because it makes it go quicker.
He had one small grunt,
and he didn't make a sound.
Didn't move.
He went ahead and went to heaven.
There was guards on the towers,
guards all over the place.
Finally the chaplain said
that he had been killed,
that he was dead.
The lights came on, the cameras came on,
and it's like they just won
a Super Bowl over there.
And my mom, my sister,
just falling and crying... and my aunts.
Cameras everywhere.
My mom had sent Ruben
a necklace with a cross.
The chaplain came back,
and he handed it to my mom.
That was it.
She says that he's now resting.
He's not in jail. He's... at
least he's free now.
Ruben Cantu was an innocent man, young man.
There was no evidence to convict him,
nothing whatsoever, but he's executed.
Richard Reyna was not able
to save Ruben's life
because the NAACP hadn't
hired him to investigate the case
until ten years after Ruben's execution.
As long as no one is held accountable,
these things are going to continue.
People are going to be falsely accused,
sentenced to die, and even executed.
My brother was innocent,
and I just want his name cleared.
When it all comes out,
I want the state of Texas to come out
and make it public and
apologize to our family.
The District Attorney's office
started saying that all we want is money.
It ain't about the money.
All the money in the world's
not gonna bring my brother back,
but at least I'll have comfort
knowing that he's been cleared.
And while this case
wasn't brought to Lise Olsen
until 11 years after Ruben was killed,
for her, the stakes were clear.
There's never been an executed offender
in modern history exonerated.
It was something that would be historic.
It was gonna be a story that
was going to have reverberations.
In 2005, after months of investigation,
Lise was ready to publish her articles
about Ruben Cantu's innocence, but first,
she had to confront former
District Attorney Sam Millsap.
Juan Moreno retracting his testimony
just destroyed the case.
This was game-changing,
and the person who
could've changed this game
was Sam Millsap, elected District Attorney,
the person who decides
whether we seek the death penalty
in a capital murder case.
So I drove to San Antonio.
Lise was about to publicly challenge
one of the biggest decisions
of Sam Millsap's career.
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 bull,"
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,
and Bill Ewell said to me that the reason
that they took another look at Ruben
was this other shooting in the pool hall.
A sense of dread came over Sam Millsap
as he listened to Lise's claims.
In the middle of that,
he sort of got this look
on his face that was more than surprise.
It was kind of anguish, I would say.
When I looked at the file,
I was horrified by what I saw.
I don't think horrified
is too strong a word.
I could not believe that
I had made the decision
to prosecute a capital
murder based on the testimony
of a single eyewitness,
and I said to Lise that
I had made a mistake.
When he said he thought he made a mistake,
I thought,
"Wow, that's just amazing.
That's not what I expected at all,"
and in fact, I expected him to be defensive
of his decision,
to protect his own reputation.
But he was just so floored,
because he had been at peace,
I think, in his mind that he
had made the right decision.
There's not anything, I think,
that could possibly be more difficult
for a responsible prosecutor
than the realization
that he may be responsible
for the execution of an innocent person.
You know,
I was always very proud of the fact
that I was the District Attorney
when I was 35 years old,
but the thing that I realized
was that there was value to experience.
I didn't know enough to
realize that you shouldn't place
the kind of weight that
we placed on the testimony
of a single eyewitness.
That is just haunting.
On the eve of November 20, 2005,
Lise Olsen was putting the
finishing touches on her story,
which was set to run on the front page
of the next day's paper.
Amazingly, Sam Millsap was
saying that he thought
a mistake had been made,
and that was definitely
gonna be a huge story.
But Lise's story was going to be more
than just an exposé about
Ruben Cantu's innocence.
Lise was about to point to
who she felt the real killer was.
♪♪
On November 20, 2005,
Lise Olsen's story about
the case for Ruben Cantu's
innocence hit newsstands in Texas.
The San Antonio Express News
and the Houston Chronicle both
ran those stories on their front
pages for two days in a row.
Juan Moreno retracting his
testimony was a lightning story.
It just went everywhere.
It got picked up all over the country.
As part of her story,
Lise spoke with the
accomplice to the murder,
David Garza, about who the real killer was.
David took a plea for armed robbery,
a lesser offense,
and was sentenced to 20 years.
He said, "Ruben wasn't there that night."
He said, "There was someone else with me."
I don't plan on saying
the name of the person
that was with me,
but I can assure you for a fact
that it was not Ruben Cantu.
The person that was
with me is still out there.
David Garza confirmed to
me that there was another boy
who was about the same age as Ruben
who had curly hair,
little lighter hair than Ruben's.
A boy with curly hair
had also been mentioned
by Juan Moreno when he
spoke with Richard Reyna.
The guy with the curly hair
never appeared in the photos
they showed me.
He is the person who shot,
who entered the house.
A lot of investigators
came with photographs,
but that person with the
curly hair never appeared.
But if Ruben Cantu was innocent,
why did David Garza
allow Ruben to be executed?
David told me, "We had a code of silence.
We didn't talk.
We knew that talking
to the police would only
get us in more trouble."
Me and Ruben,
we would never snitch each other out
for anybody else involved.
That was our loyalty to... no
matter who was involved.
But another friend of David and Ruben's
did name names.
Ramiro Reyes, who had curly hair,
was brought in twice by police as a suspect
in the murder before telling detectives
that Cantu had been the shooter.
Ramiro told the police
that Ruben confessed to him
that he was the shooter, but consider
who is saying that Ruben confessed to them.
Do you think that Ramiro is going to say,
"Yeah, I did it"?
That's never going to happen.
So he fixed it up pretty good for himself.
You know,
he shoved everything over to Ruben.
"It wasn't me. You know, it was Ruben."
But if Ramiro did implicate Ruben Cantu
for the murder, why was he never
called to testify at Cantu's trial?
A transcript from a
pretrial hearing reveals
that before getting his statement,
police beat and handcuffed Ramiro
without reading him his rights,
threw him into a wall,
and threatened to charge
him with the offense.
Ramiro, we suspected,
was the guy that did it.
He had kinky hair,
but the police just turned him loose.
♪♪
Susan Reed, the judge who signed
Ruben's death warrant,
was now District Attorney of San Antonio.
Under pressure to respond
to Lise Olsen's charges
of misconduct,
Reed ordered an internal investigation.
The way the case was
being put out into the public
was that Juan Moreno supposedly,
according to the articles,
was pressured into identifying
somebody who was innocent
of a crime in court.
The police were being
attacked for the method
that they were using,
that the police were using
in their photo lineups.
So we did an investigation.
One of the questions for
Susan Reed early on was,
is it appropriate for
your office to be involved
in this investigation?
Because she definitely
had a stake in the case.
There was no way that, given that history,
she could possibly be objective.
Sort of like grading your own paper,
you know?
They kept trying to knock
me off this investigation.
I think there were three different motions
saying I shouldn't be
conducting the investigation.
It was kind of like I was under attack too.
But Susan Reed and her office
had the power to fight back.
Not only would Lise
Olsen soon feel threatened,
but Juan Moreno would
face possible prison time.
Lise Olsen's reporting about Texas possibly
executing an innocent man in Ruben Cantu
sent shockwaves through the state,
and District Attorney Susan Reed responded
by going on the offensive.
Susan Reed, she went after Lise first.
They wanted to know her sources,
and Lise called me and said,
"They're gonna take me before a grand jury,
and if I don't
disclose my information,
I think that they're going to jail me."
So I said, "Lise,
just feel free to give them my name.
That's okay. We have nothing to hide."
Richard agreed to meet
with Reed's investigators
and shared his materials from the case.
What we discovered was that Juan Moreno
was literally manipulated
by the investigator.
The investigator worked on his wife,
and he would send her flowers,
and he'd phone call.
He was taking them out to dinner.
He was making payments to the family,
and it was an extremely
manipulative investigation.
Reed's report says that Juan Moreno
changed his story because I paid him.
That's absurd.
This is a hardworking man.
Now, if Juan Moreno says,
"Okay, I'll spend a day with you,"
I need to reimburse him
on whatever he loses.
That's the standard thing to do.
We've never had anyone ever,
anyone ever, ever,
question that except Susan Reed.
Juan Moreno had absolutely nothing to gain
by making a decision to
go public with his story.
The biggest newspaper in the state of Texas
is going to say that he had
identified the wrong person
in a capital murder case,
which he felt bad about.
As far as Susan Reed was concerned,
if Juan's story about
Ruben's innocence was true,
she would take aggressive action.
I have very strong feelings that
someone who commits perjury
that results in someone being executed
needs to be held accountable.
My primary concern
when all of this arose was
is there sufficient cause
to indict Juan Moreno
for murder by perjury?
Susan Reed suggested that they
could get him murder by perjury.
I've never seen anybody charged with that,
but Juan Moreno was intimidated badly.
He was shaken scared.
His wife was scared.
Their son was scared, and I felt terrible,
because I brought him out.
- I think she would've been
- better off if she hadn't talked
About murder by perjury.
I don't think anybody ever thought
that was the smart thing to do.
In the end, Susan Reed absolved
the San Antonio Police Department
and Juan Moreno of any wrongdoing,
saying they had helped convict
a guilty man, Ruben Cantu.
Opponents called the
investigation blatantly biased
and petitioned for an independent inquiry.
Susan Reed,
the District Attorney of San Antonio
for 16 years, declined their request.
With the government denying
any fault in the execution
of Ruben Cantu,
Ruben's family cannot sue for damages,
and the Cantus aren't the only ones
who have struggled to move on.
It certainly never occurred to me
that we might've gotten it
wrong in the Cantu case.
But the one thing that is
abundantly clear to me today
is that if anybody got it wrong, it was me,
and the way I got it wrong is that I made
a flawed decision, and that's a mistake
in judgment that I will live
with for the rest of my life.
As for Susan Reed, the events
of the Ruben Cantu case
haven't shaken her
belief in the death penalty.
I have seen evil. I
have tried cases of evil,
evil people who are never going to change,
and therefore, they should be executed.
♪♪
The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters.
Ruben is five years older than me.
As we were growing up,
I would sleep next to him,
and I always had to have my leg touching
his leg, 'cause I wouldn't sleep.
I was scared.
I had to touch him until I fell asleep.
- Though I walk through the valley
- of the shadow of death.
Later on, I had dreams of him coming out
and he and I hanging out together.
Anoints my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the
house of the Lord forever.
of Death Row Stories...
A brutal murder in Texas... He went crazy.
He started shooting all over the place.
Lands a 17-year-old offender
on death row.
Young people were
committing very adult crimes.
But with questionable evidence...
There's no guns. There's no blood,
DNA, nothing.
And a death sentence looming...
Execution was at midnight in those days.
A DA has doubts.
I was horrified by what I saw.
And a boy's life hangs in the balance.
Evil people are never going to change,
and they should be executed.
There's a body in the water.
He was butchered and murdered.
Many people proclaim their innocence.
In this case,
there are a number of things that stink.
This man is remorseless.
He needs to pay for it with his life.
The electric chair
flashed in front of my eyes.
Get a conviction at all costs.
Let the truth fall where it may.
On the South Side of San Antonio, Texas,
late on a fall evening in 1984,
a murder was about to take place.
The neighborhood was very tough.
You know,
there are street gangs all over the place.
People talk about the Mexican Mafia.
In a small, half-built house
slept two construction workers,
19-year-old Juan Moreno
and 25-year-old Pedro Gomez.
They were spending the night there because,
I believe,
the owner of the house had
had a water heater stolen,
so he'd asked them to stay there
to protect his property
as he built his house.
But Juan and Pedro were about
to have unexpected company.
What happened that particular night...
These two decided to go into the house.
One of them sneaked in through a window,
opened the back door for the other guy,
and the other guy had a rifle.
The robbers turned on a light
and discovered Juan and
Pedro sleeping on the floor.
Juan Moreno was hit
on the head with the rifle.
The other guy wakes up,
and he had a gun underneath the pillow,
so reaches for it.
And when Pedro Gomez reached under there,
that's when the assailants
unloaded on the two of them.
The guy with the rifle, he just panicked,
and he just started shooting.
Juan and Pedro were each shot nine times.
The robbers took their
wallets and watches and fled,
leaving their victims for dead.
I think the number of shots
fired was pretty intensive.
Normally you shoot 'em
once or twice or whatever.
You get out of there.
But they were shot several times,
so it was a pretty vicious crime.
Pedro Gomez was shot in the head
and died instantly,
but Juan Moreno, despite his wounds,
managed to crawl to his
pickup truck and call for help.
Eventually taken to the hospital,
Juan lost a lung, a kidney,
and part of his stomach.
He was near death after the shooting.
I think it's almost a
miracle that he survived.
It's because of his age.
He was young and strong.
Juan, still struggling to survive,
told police his attackers had
been two Hispanic teenagers,
but that description matched
thousands of young men in the area.
San Antonio police canvassed
the South Side neighborhood,
but in an area dominated
by a ruthless street gang
with a strict code of silence,
the trail ran cold.
But three weeks after the murder,
rumors started swirling
at a local high school
that two teenagers...
David Garza, age 15,
and Ruben Cantu, age 17...
Had committed the crime.
Ruben had even bragged
about being the shooter.
People differ about whether Ruben himself
was part of a gang.
His older brothers were in gangs.
There were low-level pool halls.
There was drug dealing in the streets.
There was a car theft ring active
in that same neighborhood.
It was a tough place to grow up.
Four months after the shooting,
Juan Moreno,
still recovering from his wounds,
was shown a police photo
lineup with Ruben Cantu's picture.
Moreno identified Ruben
Cantu as the assailant.
He was charged with murder,
and the case was taken and accepted
by the District Attorney's office.
District Attorney Sam Millsap,
the youngest big-city DA in the country,
would now decide whether
to try 17-year-old Ruben Cantu
as an adult,
making him eligible for the death penalty.
We had very, very young people
who were committing very adult crimes,
very brutal crimes,
and I was moved by that.
The only thing that a prosecutor
could do in that situation,
because of the brutality of the crime,
was to prosecute it as a capital murder,
and I had a perfect record
in death penalty cases.
Ruben Cantu's trial began on July 22, 1985.
In court, the prosecution's star witness,
Juan Moreno,
described how Cantu shot
Pedro Gomez in the head,
then turned the rifle on him
and riddled his body with bullets.
Mr. Moreno was a very good witness.
He was very sympathetic.
I know, at one time,
he was asked to raise his shirt
and show the scars and the
wounds that he had received.
When the jury saw the scars,
that made a pretty big impression.
I also asked,
"Are you able to identify in court today
the man who shot and killed your friend?"
And he was able to say, "Yes, I see him.
He's sitting right there,"
and pointed to Mr. Cantu.
A jury decided very quickly too.
In just an hour and a half,
they ruled that Cantu
should die by lethal injection.
Cantu's family is stunned.
A supporter of Cantu
tried to block the camera
minutes after the jury
returned with its decision
that Cantu should be executed.
District Attorney Sam Millsap
agreed with the jury's verdict.
Ruben Cantu arguably
received a perfect trial.
I say that because he had a fair judge.
He had a very fine defense lawyer.
He had an ethical prosecutor.
And the jury made the only
decision that they could make
under the circumstances.
Ruben's accomplice,
a man named David Garza,
received 20 years.
Cantu was sent to solitary confinement
at the Huntsville State Penitentiary,
230 miles east of San Antonio.
From his cell, Ruben wrote a letter
addressed to the citizens of San Antonio.
This was a letter he wrote
not long after he was convicted.
It says, "My name is Ruben M. Cantu,
and I'm only 18 years old.
And I have been framed
in a capital murder case,
so I'm going to have to spend
the rest of my life in prison
or die by so-called lethal injection."
It's an angry letter.
He's outraged about what's happened to him,
but it's got some very,
very powerful charges in it.
For Sam Millsap,
the letter was just another
convict claiming innocence,
but as the years went by,
Millsap began to have doubts.
It never occurred to me
when I was 35 years old and I
was the smartest guy in the room
that the criminal justice system
could get it wrong in these cases.
If I could do it over again,
I never would've made the decision
to prosecute Ruben
Cantu for capital murder.
♪♪
In 1985,
Sam Millsap successfully sent
juvenile offender Ruben Cantu
to death row for the murder of Pedro Gomez.
It was not a difficult decision in 1985
to prosecute the case
as a capital murder case
because we had a survivor of a brutal crime
who was able to identify Cantu,
but there are things that I
know and understand today
that I didn't understand at that point.
Ruben came from South San Antonio
in what was a very tough neighborhood.
His parents split when he was a young kid,
and his mother left,
and he stayed with his father.
He was a pretty good older brother to me.
He would look out for me,
and everything was fine
up until this happened.
A cousin of mine called and
said that he had been on the news,
that he'd been arrested for murder.
I was just, like, devastated,
you know, in disbelief.
On death row,
Ruben wrote a letter claiming
he'd been framed by police.
That got the attention of the NAACP,
who hired Richard Reyna to investigate.
As a former cop,
Reyna had heard claims of innocence before.
Naturally not all the time
are you gonna run into
people that are innocent,
but what got my curiosity on this case is
that they didn't really have any evidence
connecting Ruben to that house.
No fingerprints, no physical evidence,
none whatsoever.
Richard also discovered that police
had only focused their attention on Ruben
after he was involved
in an unrelated crime.
I saw where Ruben had been
involved with a police officer
in a shootout at some bar
not pertaining to this murder.
I think Ruben was arrested
because of something that
happened after that murder.
He and a couple of his friends
were at a bar shooting pool,
and they had a conflict
with an off-duty officer.
He accidently hit him with a pool stick.
Words were exchanged.
The off-duty officer was Joe De La Luz,
a 16-year veteran of the force.
The officer... he showed him his weapons.
He was in regular civilian clothes,
so they didn't know.
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 PD,
had another idea.
The Gomez murder had
gone unsolved for four months.
Bill Ewell was a friend of Joe De La Luz,
the officer who was shot,
and he also ended up being the person
who was in charge of
this murder investigation.
So after the shooting
of Bill Ewell's friend,
Bill Ewell decides to take
another look at Ruben Cantu.
By now, Juan Moreno had twice failed
to identify Ruben Cantu as the shooter,
but with Ruben in custody,
Ewell sent a detective to Juan's home.
I took the photos, the forms,
and a portable typewriter.
I showed Juan this array.
He sat there, looked at 'em
and looked at 'em and looked at 'em,
and he shoved them aside
and looked away from them.
And he said, "Look, I know who did it.
I know who shot me,
so why do I have to identify anyone
out of this photo array?"
And so I said, "Well, who did it?"
He said, "Ruben Cantu."
Well, we went round and round,
and I could tell that the
guy was very scared,
and he didn't want to sign anything.
I think that he was afraid of retaliation.
He just would not do it,
so I folded up my
typewriter and bid farewell.
It didn't make any sense
to me that Juan Moreno
supposedly saw Ruben Cantu face to face,
inches apart when he was shot,
but they showed him at least
five or more photo lineups
with Ruben Cantu in these lineups,
and he still couldn't identify him.
Why is he not being identified?
Still unsatisfied,
police brought Juan Moreno to the station
and told him Ruben had
just shot a police officer.
This time, Moreno finally
picked Ruben out of a lineup.
Now they come back and say,
"He identified Ruben Cantu as the shooter,"
and that was it.
You know, and I said,
"No, that doesn't work."
You can see quickly that
there's a pattern there,
and it doesn't work.
Richard needed to speak with Juan himself.
After weeks of effort,
he finally tracked down Juan
and convinced him to
do a videotaped interview.
Reyna: The police say you were scared
when you saw the photograph
of the person who shot you?
Moreno: No, I was never scared.
Maybe it was from the pain,
from the anesthesia,
but I was never scared of the photographs.
Reyna: The police say you told them...
"The person who shot us
both is named Ruben Cantu."
Is that true?
Moreno: I could never tell them the name
because I didn't know the name.
Richard also asked Juan
about his statement fingering Cantu,
which was written in English.
Reyna: Do you understand
what this statement says?
Moreno: No, it's written in English
and I don't understand English.
Juan kept telling me,
"The police kept showing up,
and they kept showing me photo lineups,
and I said,
'It wasn't him. He's not in here.'
And 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.
And 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 Lise Olsen for help.
Lise reported on crime and corruption
at the Houston Chronicle.
I got a tip from one of
my death penalty sources
that 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 who have innocence claims,
and often, they're fabricated claims.
It is very unusual, though,
for a case to rest on
such limited evidence.
I thought,
"Was 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.
♪♪
By 1993, Ruben Cantu had spent eight years
in solitary confinement
while his appeals unfolded.
I just wanted him to get out.
You know, I would go there,
and I was scared.
You know, it's jail,
prison. I've never been locked up.
It was just scary. It was just terrifying.
He's only, like, 20-something,
and I was like, "Man, you know,
when he gets out, you know,
we're gonna go do this.
We're gonna go do that."
Ruben's appellate lawyer was determined
to get Ruben off death row,
but in appeal after appeal,
Ruben's case was denied in
both Texas and Federal courts.
Do you feel like anyone's
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 error that had been committed
during the course of the trial
that would've justified a reversal.
It was as clean as they come.
In a last-ditch effort,
Ruben's lawyer requested a hearing
in front of Judge Susan D. Reed,
a former prosecutor elected to the bench
on a strong law and order platform.
I have always believed that
the death penalty is
appropriate in certain cases.
I was not in the District Attorney's office
when it was being tried,
but I have no reason to
believe it wasn't a fair trial.
And I decided there was no
cause to do an evidentiary hearing.
Everything that you're saying,
the court's already
dealt with on your appeal,
and so after the appellate
courts have ruled,
you have to give them a date.
Susan Reed set an execution date
for August 24, 1993.
Ruben's last option was
to appeal for clemency,
but governors in Texas
had a notorious history
with the death penalty.
These hardened criminals
will never again murder,
rape, or deal drugs.
As governor, I made sure they received
the ultimate punishment... death.
And Texas is a safer place for it.
Your state has executed
234 death row inmates.
Have you...
Have you struggled to sleep at night?
No, sir,
I've never struggled with that at all.
Texans are hardwired to
support the death penalty.
There may be a gene
that is unique to people
who are born and live in Texas.
We are programmed to
believe that the death penalty
is a necessary part of
our criminal justice system.
We love a good execution.
Since 1976,
Texas has executed well over 500 people,
more than the next six states combined.
Since I've been governor,
we have put 45 people to death.
It is not something that
anybody wants to deal with,
but they won't commit another crime.
The governor during Ruben's clemency appeal
was the colorful leader of the
Texas Democrats, Ann Richards.
Poor George.
He was born with a
silver foot in his mouth.
In Texas, even liberal icon Ann Richards
would not dispute the death penalty.
On August 23, 1994,
the day before he was to be executed,
Ruben Cantu received the reply:
"Clemency denied."
A San Antonio man
continues to claim innocence
just hours before he is
set to die by lethal injection.
On the day of his scheduled execution,
local stations aired an
interview with Ruben,
where he again declared his innocence.
By law standards,
my case is barely legally sufficient...
To hold up a capital
murder conviction because
of the eyewitness.
Yet his testimony,
just looking at his testimony...
You don't know where he's coming from.
But in the death house at Huntsville,
where all Texas executions take place,
preparations for Ruben's
execution proceeded.
Execution was at midnight in those days.
Reverend Carroll Pickett
was chaplain
at the Huntsville prison for 16 years.
Ruben had been visiting
with his family most of that day.
They have different rooms,
and in each room, they have phones,
so all of us would be
on the phone with Ruben.
He was in a single cell.
Across from where he was
sitting was the death chamber.
He said that once that
medicine ran through his veins
and he shut his eyes,
that that's when he was
gonna grab God's hand,
and God was gonna take him.
Then I hear noise in the background,
and I ask him,
and he says they're
setting up the equipment.
And we're still waiting
for the lawyer to call,
hoping that it would stop.
And then I guess around 11:45,
they said that he had to leave.
It was time to go, and he started crying,
and he says, "Everything's gonna be okay."
And I was still hoping for that lawyer,
just waiting for that call.
♪♪
Ruben Cantu was scheduled to be executed
after midnight on August 24, 1993.
As the hour approached,
Ruben said good-bye to his family.
They told him it was time.
He just said, "I love y'all,
and, you know, everything's gonna be fine."
And they took him down the hallway,
and they changed... he
changed into a black outfit.
Didn't hear from him anymore.
He got down on the floor, and he prayed,
and he rose up and said,
"I'm not innocent of sin,
but I'm not guilty of this crime."
Right at 12:00, I said,
"You crawl up on the gurney."
He said, "Okay."
They strapped him down,
and he got nine straps on him.
And I put my hand on his shoulder
and said, "Okay, Ruben, are you ready?"
I said,
"Is there anything I can do for you now?"
He said, "No, everything's gonna be okay."
We were having a candlelight vigil,
and across the street from where we're at,
there's a lot of college students
that are having a big old party,
you know, "Kill him. Hang him."
Oh, you know, all this stuff.
You know, you're out there,
and you're looking at the clock,
and you can't do anything.
You're just helpless, powerless.
- What I told him to do is,
- you know, put his head back
And try to get all the
air out of your lungs,
because it makes it go quicker.
He had one small grunt,
and he didn't make a sound.
Didn't move.
He went ahead and went to heaven.
There was guards on the towers,
guards all over the place.
Finally the chaplain said
that he had been killed,
that he was dead.
The lights came on, the cameras came on,
and it's like they just won
a Super Bowl over there.
And my mom, my sister,
just falling and crying... and my aunts.
Cameras everywhere.
My mom had sent Ruben
a necklace with a cross.
The chaplain came back,
and he handed it to my mom.
That was it.
She says that he's now resting.
He's not in jail. He's... at
least he's free now.
Ruben Cantu was an innocent man, young man.
There was no evidence to convict him,
nothing whatsoever, but he's executed.
Richard Reyna was not able
to save Ruben's life
because the NAACP hadn't
hired him to investigate the case
until ten years after Ruben's execution.
As long as no one is held accountable,
these things are going to continue.
People are going to be falsely accused,
sentenced to die, and even executed.
My brother was innocent,
and I just want his name cleared.
When it all comes out,
I want the state of Texas to come out
and make it public and
apologize to our family.
The District Attorney's office
started saying that all we want is money.
It ain't about the money.
All the money in the world's
not gonna bring my brother back,
but at least I'll have comfort
knowing that he's been cleared.
And while this case
wasn't brought to Lise Olsen
until 11 years after Ruben was killed,
for her, the stakes were clear.
There's never been an executed offender
in modern history exonerated.
It was something that would be historic.
It was gonna be a story that
was going to have reverberations.
In 2005, after months of investigation,
Lise was ready to publish her articles
about Ruben Cantu's innocence, but first,
she had to confront former
District Attorney Sam Millsap.
Juan Moreno retracting his testimony
just destroyed the case.
This was game-changing,
and the person who
could've changed this game
was Sam Millsap, elected District Attorney,
the person who decides
whether we seek the death penalty
in a capital murder case.
So I drove to San Antonio.
Lise was about to publicly challenge
one of the biggest decisions
of Sam Millsap's career.
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 bull,"
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,
and Bill Ewell said to me that the reason
that they took another look at Ruben
was this other shooting in the pool hall.
A sense of dread came over Sam Millsap
as he listened to Lise's claims.
In the middle of that,
he sort of got this look
on his face that was more than surprise.
It was kind of anguish, I would say.
When I looked at the file,
I was horrified by what I saw.
I don't think horrified
is too strong a word.
I could not believe that
I had made the decision
to prosecute a capital
murder based on the testimony
of a single eyewitness,
and I said to Lise that
I had made a mistake.
When he said he thought he made a mistake,
I thought,
"Wow, that's just amazing.
That's not what I expected at all,"
and in fact, I expected him to be defensive
of his decision,
to protect his own reputation.
But he was just so floored,
because he had been at peace,
I think, in his mind that he
had made the right decision.
There's not anything, I think,
that could possibly be more difficult
for a responsible prosecutor
than the realization
that he may be responsible
for the execution of an innocent person.
You know,
I was always very proud of the fact
that I was the District Attorney
when I was 35 years old,
but the thing that I realized
was that there was value to experience.
I didn't know enough to
realize that you shouldn't place
the kind of weight that
we placed on the testimony
of a single eyewitness.
That is just haunting.
On the eve of November 20, 2005,
Lise Olsen was putting the
finishing touches on her story,
which was set to run on the front page
of the next day's paper.
Amazingly, Sam Millsap was
saying that he thought
a mistake had been made,
and that was definitely
gonna be a huge story.
But Lise's story was going to be more
than just an exposé about
Ruben Cantu's innocence.
Lise was about to point to
who she felt the real killer was.
♪♪
On November 20, 2005,
Lise Olsen's story about
the case for Ruben Cantu's
innocence hit newsstands in Texas.
The San Antonio Express News
and the Houston Chronicle both
ran those stories on their front
pages for two days in a row.
Juan Moreno retracting his
testimony was a lightning story.
It just went everywhere.
It got picked up all over the country.
As part of her story,
Lise spoke with the
accomplice to the murder,
David Garza, about who the real killer was.
David took a plea for armed robbery,
a lesser offense,
and was sentenced to 20 years.
He said, "Ruben wasn't there that night."
He said, "There was someone else with me."
I don't plan on saying
the name of the person
that was with me,
but I can assure you for a fact
that it was not Ruben Cantu.
The person that was
with me is still out there.
David Garza confirmed to
me that there was another boy
who was about the same age as Ruben
who had curly hair,
little lighter hair than Ruben's.
A boy with curly hair
had also been mentioned
by Juan Moreno when he
spoke with Richard Reyna.
The guy with the curly hair
never appeared in the photos
they showed me.
He is the person who shot,
who entered the house.
A lot of investigators
came with photographs,
but that person with the
curly hair never appeared.
But if Ruben Cantu was innocent,
why did David Garza
allow Ruben to be executed?
David told me, "We had a code of silence.
We didn't talk.
We knew that talking
to the police would only
get us in more trouble."
Me and Ruben,
we would never snitch each other out
for anybody else involved.
That was our loyalty to... no
matter who was involved.
But another friend of David and Ruben's
did name names.
Ramiro Reyes, who had curly hair,
was brought in twice by police as a suspect
in the murder before telling detectives
that Cantu had been the shooter.
Ramiro told the police
that Ruben confessed to him
that he was the shooter, but consider
who is saying that Ruben confessed to them.
Do you think that Ramiro is going to say,
"Yeah, I did it"?
That's never going to happen.
So he fixed it up pretty good for himself.
You know,
he shoved everything over to Ruben.
"It wasn't me. You know, it was Ruben."
But if Ramiro did implicate Ruben Cantu
for the murder, why was he never
called to testify at Cantu's trial?
A transcript from a
pretrial hearing reveals
that before getting his statement,
police beat and handcuffed Ramiro
without reading him his rights,
threw him into a wall,
and threatened to charge
him with the offense.
Ramiro, we suspected,
was the guy that did it.
He had kinky hair,
but the police just turned him loose.
♪♪
Susan Reed, the judge who signed
Ruben's death warrant,
was now District Attorney of San Antonio.
Under pressure to respond
to Lise Olsen's charges
of misconduct,
Reed ordered an internal investigation.
The way the case was
being put out into the public
was that Juan Moreno supposedly,
according to the articles,
was pressured into identifying
somebody who was innocent
of a crime in court.
The police were being
attacked for the method
that they were using,
that the police were using
in their photo lineups.
So we did an investigation.
One of the questions for
Susan Reed early on was,
is it appropriate for
your office to be involved
in this investigation?
Because she definitely
had a stake in the case.
There was no way that, given that history,
she could possibly be objective.
Sort of like grading your own paper,
you know?
They kept trying to knock
me off this investigation.
I think there were three different motions
saying I shouldn't be
conducting the investigation.
It was kind of like I was under attack too.
But Susan Reed and her office
had the power to fight back.
Not only would Lise
Olsen soon feel threatened,
but Juan Moreno would
face possible prison time.
Lise Olsen's reporting about Texas possibly
executing an innocent man in Ruben Cantu
sent shockwaves through the state,
and District Attorney Susan Reed responded
by going on the offensive.
Susan Reed, she went after Lise first.
They wanted to know her sources,
and Lise called me and said,
"They're gonna take me before a grand jury,
and if I don't
disclose my information,
I think that they're going to jail me."
So I said, "Lise,
just feel free to give them my name.
That's okay. We have nothing to hide."
Richard agreed to meet
with Reed's investigators
and shared his materials from the case.
What we discovered was that Juan Moreno
was literally manipulated
by the investigator.
The investigator worked on his wife,
and he would send her flowers,
and he'd phone call.
He was taking them out to dinner.
He was making payments to the family,
and it was an extremely
manipulative investigation.
Reed's report says that Juan Moreno
changed his story because I paid him.
That's absurd.
This is a hardworking man.
Now, if Juan Moreno says,
"Okay, I'll spend a day with you,"
I need to reimburse him
on whatever he loses.
That's the standard thing to do.
We've never had anyone ever,
anyone ever, ever,
question that except Susan Reed.
Juan Moreno had absolutely nothing to gain
by making a decision to
go public with his story.
The biggest newspaper in the state of Texas
is going to say that he had
identified the wrong person
in a capital murder case,
which he felt bad about.
As far as Susan Reed was concerned,
if Juan's story about
Ruben's innocence was true,
she would take aggressive action.
I have very strong feelings that
someone who commits perjury
that results in someone being executed
needs to be held accountable.
My primary concern
when all of this arose was
is there sufficient cause
to indict Juan Moreno
for murder by perjury?
Susan Reed suggested that they
could get him murder by perjury.
I've never seen anybody charged with that,
but Juan Moreno was intimidated badly.
He was shaken scared.
His wife was scared.
Their son was scared, and I felt terrible,
because I brought him out.
- I think she would've been
- better off if she hadn't talked
About murder by perjury.
I don't think anybody ever thought
that was the smart thing to do.
In the end, Susan Reed absolved
the San Antonio Police Department
and Juan Moreno of any wrongdoing,
saying they had helped convict
a guilty man, Ruben Cantu.
Opponents called the
investigation blatantly biased
and petitioned for an independent inquiry.
Susan Reed,
the District Attorney of San Antonio
for 16 years, declined their request.
With the government denying
any fault in the execution
of Ruben Cantu,
Ruben's family cannot sue for damages,
and the Cantus aren't the only ones
who have struggled to move on.
It certainly never occurred to me
that we might've gotten it
wrong in the Cantu case.
But the one thing that is
abundantly clear to me today
is that if anybody got it wrong, it was me,
and the way I got it wrong is that I made
a flawed decision, and that's a mistake
in judgment that I will live
with for the rest of my life.
As for Susan Reed, the events
of the Ruben Cantu case
haven't shaken her
belief in the death penalty.
I have seen evil. I
have tried cases of evil,
evil people who are never going to change,
and therefore, they should be executed.
♪♪
The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want.
He makes me to lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters.
Ruben is five years older than me.
As we were growing up,
I would sleep next to him,
and I always had to have my leg touching
his leg, 'cause I wouldn't sleep.
I was scared.
I had to touch him until I fell asleep.
- Though I walk through the valley
- of the shadow of death.
Later on, I had dreams of him coming out
and he and I hanging out together.
Anoints my head with oil.
My cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the
house of the Lord forever.