Four days after a Bexar County jury delivered its verdict, Cantu wrote this letter to the residents of San Antonio: "My name is Ruben M. Cantu and I am only 18 years old. I got to the 9th grade and I have been framed in a capital murder case."
A dozen years after his execution, a Houston Chronicle investigation suggests that Cantu, a former special-ed student who grew up in a tough neighborhood on the south side of San Antonio, was likely telling the truth.
If the justice system was perfect, I would have no problem with the government killing the worst of the worst. I thought, at least in death penalty cases, the worst that we could do is kill a man who "most certainly did it"... maybe a little doubt about the details, but the general findings of the case were correct. That gave me pause, but not enough to switch me from pro to anti. However, this guy was executed for a crime he almost certainly wasn't even present for. That is as much a crime as the original crime itself, and now that I know such a thing has happened... and I am aware of it, I can no longer support the death penalty.
Yes... I am sure that you can e-mail me stories of this happening before, and if you had e-mailed them to me before I read this article, it would have changed my mind as well. But if there are stories like that out there, I didn't know about them. Now I do. I was never that strong a supporter of the death penalty. Now, I'm against it... not rabidly so, but against it nonetheless.
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