According to a report by the Houston Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, the police sergeant in charge of the inves­ti­ga­tion that led to the pos­si­ble wrong­ful exe­cu­tion of Ruben Cantu in Texas had a record of wrong­ful arrests and was sus­pend­ed three times for errors in judg­ment dur­ing his three decades with the San Antonio Police Department. Official doc­u­ments exam­ined by the papers revealed that Sergeant Bill Ewell, who super­vised the homi­cide unit and was one of the dri­ving forces behind the 1985 cap­i­tal mur­der con­vic­tion of Cantu, par­tic­i­pat­ed in at least two doc­u­ment­ed faulty arrests dur­ing his years of ser­vice. Both of those cas­es involved Ewell’s friend and col­league, offi­cer Joe De La Luz, whom Cantu shot and wound­ed in a pool hall brawl in 1985. Though that inci­dent was unre­lat­ed to the crime for which Cantu was ulti­mate­ly exe­cut­ed, De La Luz’s shoot­ing result­ed in Ewell’s rekin­dled inter­est in Cantu as a sus­pect in an unsolved cap­i­tal mur­der for which he was lat­er con­vict­ed and exe­cut­ed.

The state’s death penal­ty case against Cantu relied heav­i­ly on the tes­ti­mo­ny of the crime’s only sur­viv­ing eye­wit­ness, Juan Moreno, a 19-year-old ille­gal immi­grant. During ini­tial ques­tion­ing about the case, Moreno reject­ed Cantu’s pho­to in a line­up of poten­tial sus­pects. After Cantu shot De La Luz, Ewell ordered inves­ti­ga­tors to ques­tion Moreno a sec­ond and third time. Moreno now says that dur­ing the ques­tion­ing he was pres­sured by police to iden­ti­fy Cantu as the mur­der­er. His tes­ti­mo­ny dur­ing Cantu’s tri­al was the only piece of evi­dence link­ing Cantu to the mur­der. Both Ewell and De La Luz also tes­ti­fied at Cantu’s tri­al, but nei­ther the jurors nor the attor­neys heard about their friend­ship or about the dubi­ous arrests they had made togeth­er. Sam Millsap, the for­mer Bexar County dis­trict attor­ney who made the deci­sion to seek the death penal­ty in the Cantu case, now says that he is trou­bled by the fact that Ewell and De La Luz’s friend­ship went undis­closed dur­ing the tri­al. He notes that a close friend of De La Luz’s should have had noth­ing to do with inves­ti­gat­ing Cantu in the pool hall shoot­ing or the unre­lat­ed cap­i­tal murder case.

(Lise Olsen, Houston Chronicle, Maro Robbins, San Antonio Express-News, July 9, 2006). See Innocence.

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