Dec. 1
TEXAS:
Nanny is indicted on capital murder charge----McKinney: Woman accused of
killing boy could face death penalty
A Collin County grand jury indicted a nanny on a capital murder charge in
the death of a 14-month-old in her care.
Ada Betty Cuadros Fernandez, 27, was arrested in October after Kyle
Lazarchik died of a severe brain injury. McKinney police have said she
repeatedly told them Kyle hit his head on a door frame.
The grand jury met Tuesday, and the indictment was made public Wednesday.
A capital murder conviction is punishable by death or life in prison.
Court records show doctors told police that Kyle's injuries were
comparable to a fall from a six-story building or a major car crash.
Ms. Cuadros Fernandez's attorney, Laurie Ewing, said Kyle's injuries were
the result of an accident.
"We have been investigating and learned a lot. I think the evidence is
going to show it was an accident," Ms. Ewing said. "That's not to minimize
the loss of the family."
Ms. Ewing said she could not elaborate on the evidence.
Ms. Cuadros Fernandez, a citizen of Peru who cared for Kyle and his twin
for about a year, has declined to comment from jail.
She gave notice to the boy's parents that she was planning to return to
Peru. She had a one-way airline ticket for Oct. 29, according to the
arrest warrant affidavit. She had moved out, but the family asked her to
return for two more nights while the couple interviewed candidates for the
nanny job, according to the affidavit.
The boy's family could not be reached for comment.
Police said that Kyle's injuries were internal and that he did not have
cuts or scrapes on his head. Police said Ms. Cuadros Fernandez told them
that after Kyle hit his head, he threw up blood and food he had just
eaten, and began convulsing.
"It's a tragic situation all around," Ms. Ewing said. "There are no
winners."
McKinney police did not return a phone call seeking comment.
(source: Dallas Morning News)
*******************
Lawmaker says death-penalty case deserves panel review----He calls for
reform, says innocent man may have been executed
A Texas lawmaker is calling for a state body to review a 20-year-old
death-penalty case with hopes that it will spark judicial reforms aimed at
reducing wrongful executions.
Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, wants the nine-member Criminal Justice
Advisory Council to study the capital murder trial of Ruben Cantu, a San
Antonio man who was executed in 1993 for a fatal shooting during an
attempted robbery nine years earlier.
The lone witness whose testimony implicated Mr. Cantu has recently
recanted. An incarcerated co-defendant also exonerated him, and a Houston
Chronicle article cited other evidence casting doubt on the case.
"The reality that Texas may have executed an innocent man should shock us
all into action," Mr. Ellis, a council member, said in a prepared
statement Wednesday. "If the facts we now have are accurate, this was a
catastrophic failure of the entire Texas criminal justice system and
demands investigation."
The council was created in June by Gov. Rick Perry and is charged with
reviewing the state's court system and recommending reforms to the
Legislature by year's end.
Kathy Walt, the governor's spokeswoman, said Mr. Perry won't comment until
after seeing the results of an investigation into the case by Bexar County
District Attorney Susan Reed. Phone calls to Ms. Reed's office were not
immediately returned.
"It's too early to say whether those are valid claims 20 years after the
fact," Ms. Walt said. "It's certainly not the 1st time that -
post-execution - an individual has done this."
She added that other private efforts are under way to review individual
claims of wrongful execution and that the council's charge is to improve
public confidence in the overall judicial system, including the use of new
technologies.
The case's lone witness, Juan Moreno, appeared Wednesday at his attorney's
office to denounce the death penalty. He said investigators made him so
afraid that he was forced to blame Mr. Cantu.
"I was under a lot of pressure, and I wanted to get out from under the
whole court process," Mr. Moreno said through an interpreter. "There are
people who aren't responsible for crimes who are put to death."
Mr. Moreno met with Mr. Cantu's mother Tuesday and expressed sympathy for
her son, who maintained his innocence and was 17 in 1984 when he was
charged.
It was a typical case of a homicide suspect not getting adequate defense
because of his minority status and low-income background, said Mr.
Moreno's pro-bono attorney, Gerry Goldstein, and Luis Figueroa, an
attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Mr. Goldstein, a criminal defense attorney, said the judicial system must
allow more review of cases when new evidence becomes known or when DNA
tests are appropriate. He also said the system shouldn't allow one
eyewitness to implicate suspects in capital murder cases, and Ms. Walt
said the council is considering that issue.
(source: Associated Press)
*************************
Prayer Service Against the Death Penalty
A few Southeast Texans gathered at Saint Anthony Cathedral to condemn the
death penalty.
The same scene unfolded in more than three hundred cities throughout the
world Wednesday night.
Jefferson County District Attorney Tom Maness tells KBTV that he seeks
capital punishment in only the most horrific crimes. "We usually have
always sought the death penalty in the intentional taking of the life of a
police officer or fireman [or] very young children," said Maness.
But the people that showed up for the prayer service believe that
punishment is immoral.
"We pray for the person that's gonna be executed, and their families and
friends. Plus the victims of the violent crimes, and their families and
friends because we're all in this world together, and we`re all affected
by what is happening in society," said Deacon Harry Davis of the Diocese
of Beaumont.
The prayer service is held every time an execution occurs in Texas, but on
Wednesday, cities around the world joined in to protest the ultimate
punishment.
"There is a church in Rome, Sant'Egidio, that started this in 2002," said
Davis, "What we're trying to do is illuminate cities all over the world to
do away with the death penalty."
Since 1976 when the United States reinstated the death penalty, there have
been 355 executions in the state of Texas.
"I think it makes the public feel good, it's a way to get retribution,"
said Maness.
(source: KBTV News)
*****************
Witness who recanted testimony tells Cantu's mother he is sorry
She forgives him; advocacy groups call for changes to prevent wrongful
capital convictions
Juan Moreno, who has recanted testimony that resulted in the execution of
Ruben Cantu in 1993, said Wednesday he conveyed his remorse to Cantu's
mother in an emotional encounter this week.
Aurelia Cantu responded by assuring Moreno that he was a blameless "victim
of the system" like her son, Moreno's lawyer said.
"I told her I felt bad. I let her know how sorry I felt all this time,"
Moreno said in Spanish during a news conference arranged by his defense
attorney, Gerry Goldstein.
Cantu's death sentence for a 1984 murder in San Antonio was based
primarily on what Moreno now says was a faulty identification given under
intense police pressure.
"The entire system - from beginning to end, from left to right - failed,"
Goldstein said. "The fact that Juan has come forward is testament to his
courage and to the moral guilt that he has felt," Goldstein added.
Representatives of the League of United Latin American Citizens and
Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund joined Goldstein in
calling for reforms to avert miscarriages of justice.
"We believe executing an innocent person is the most serious error a
criminal justice system can make, and we believe it happened in the case
of Ruben Cantu," MALDEF lawyer Luis Figueroa said.
"The wrongful execution of Mr. Cantu revealed a criminal justice system
that is eager to hold someone accountable but reluctant to fully
investigate the case," he said.
Goldstein and Figueroa attacked what they portrayed as a widespread
perception that the only way to challenge a capital conviction is with DNA
evidence.
They said many cases don't involve DNA and that false confessions and
unreliable eyewitnesses figure prominently in many wrongful convictions,
including Cantu's.
"If we don't fix the problem, it will continue to happen. Let's not make
Ruben Cantu's death meaningless," Figueroa said.
(source: Houston Chronicle)
******************
THE CANTU CASE Bexar DA has a history in execution under probe -- The
ex-judge looking into innocence claim of man put to death calls her role
minimal
The San Antonio district attorney who promised Wednesday to vigorously
investigate the innocence claim of Ruben Cantu was a player in the case
well before his 1993 execution.
During her days as a Bexar County judge, Susan Reed rejected Cantu's
death-sentence appeal in 1988 and later set his execution date, records
show.
But Reed, who was elected district attorney in 1998, said she does not
remember Cantu and considers her previous involvement minimal and mostly
procedural. She said her staff has already requested thousands of pages of
court, jail and police records related to the case.
Cantu, 17 at the time of the murder-robbery in San Antonio, was executed
Aug. 24, 1993.
In an interview with the Houston Chronicle on Wednesday, Reed emphasized
that her office is just beginning its investigation into claims of Cantu's
innocence. But she said she is more concerned about "whether there is a
murderer out there and whether there is someone who committed perjury that
led to someone being executed."
Her review was prompted by a Chronicle investigation last month that
detailed how the lone eyewitness and the convicted accomplice to the
November 1984 murder both now say that Cantu was never at the crime scene.
A 3rd man, who never testified at Cantu's trial, has claimed that Cantu
was in Waco.
Cantu was convicted and sentenced to death in 1985 for the robbery and
shooting death of Pedro Gomez. Juan Moreno, another victim who barely
survived the robbery, was the key witness against Cantu at trial.
Moreno, who still lives in San Antonio, has said that police persuaded him
to identify Cantu as the killer. Cantu's co-defendant, David Garza, then
15, is in prison in Beaumont on an unrelated case and has named another
San Antonio man as the killer.
A third man, Eloy Gonzales of San Antonio, said he and his brothers were
in Waco with Cantu at the time of the crime.
Reed's office so far has not interviewed those 3 men, in part because
lawyers still are collecting and reviewing records, Reed said.
'Public has a right to know'
Sen. Rodney Ellis, D-Houston, called Reed's decision to review the case a
great "initial step." But he also has asked the governor to take the case
to the Governor's Criminal Justice Advisory Council.
"There ought to be an independent review in addition to the fine work
coming out of the prosecutor's office," said Ellis, who is a member of the
advisory council. "The public has a right to know if the state of Texas
has made a mistake in the administration of the death penalty."
Ellis is among several lawmakers and advocates who have called for action
by the Criminal Justice Advisory Council, though the group has not
previously tackled such a case.
"The reality that Texas may have executed an innocent man should shock us
all into action," Ellis said in a statement Wednesday. "If the facts we
now have are accurate, this was a catastrophic failure of the entire Texas
criminal justice system and demands investigation."
Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said the committee is not
"set up to look at individual cases." Walt said Perry is unlikely to act
until Reed makes findings of fact.
Reed, who also serves as president of the Texas District and County
Attorneys Association, said she thinks such investigations can and should
be conducted by local prosecutors.
"I think the responsibility lies with the jurisdiction and the person
elected in that jurisdiction."
Legal ethicist Robert Schuwerk, a University of Houston law professor and
co-author of The Handbook of Texas Lawyer and Judicial Ethics, said Reed's
former role as a judge should not disqualify her as a fact-finder. In
fact, it might motivate her to dig deeper.
"It isn't automatically a conflict," Schuwerk said. "She could have
slammed the door on it. Basically, if I were a judge and I had ruled that
somebody deserved to die and then it came out that maybe there was
evidence suggesting that he wasn't there or he was innocent, I sure would
want to get to the bottom of it."
Reed's role
Reed's involvement as a judge in the Cantu case came after she took the
place of former Bexar County District Court Judge Roy Barrera Jr., who
presided over Cantu's 1985 death-penalty trial.
As Bexar County's 144th District Judge in 1988, Reed reviewed Cantu's writ
of habeas corpus, which argued that a sentence of death constituted cruel
and unusual punishment since Cantu was a juvenile at the time of the
offense and testimony from the lone eyewitness in the case was unreliable.
In the interview Wednesday, Reed said she rejected those arguments without
hearing testimony because, she said, they had been raised and rejected by
other courts. "The court having reviewed the writ of habeas corpus filed
by Ruben Cantu and having considered the allegations is of the opinion the
writ should be denied and no need for an evidentiary hearing exists,"
reads the ruling, signed by Reed on Jan. 6, 1988.
Later, at a hearing, Cantu personally told Reed, "I'm not guilty,"
according to an old San Antonio Express-News brief. Reed said she does not
remember that brief encounter.
Deep digging urged
Nancy Barohn, an attorney who represented Cantu during his appeal, said
she hopes that Reed's staff digs beyond the paperwork.
"If she just gets the file and takes a look, it can't be much different
from the file" she reviewed as judge, Barohn said.
Sam Millsap Jr., a lawyer who was the elected Bexar County district
attorney in 1985, said it was not surprising that Reed ruled against Cantu
as a judge in 1988 since "none of the things (recently) discovered were
available to her."
But Millsap also urged a more thorough review.
"The state of Texas needs to be looking at the fundamental question of
whether or not the system is reliable enough to produce the level of
certainty that ought to be required in civilized society before people are
executed."
Perry had no comment about the Cantu case in a recent press conference.
But Walt said she thinks Cantu's case was not unique and that innocence
questions also have been raised about other death row cases in Texas, such
as that of Leonel Herrera of Edinburg, executed in 1993.
"We've had these kinds of confessions before in other death-penalty
cases," Walt said last Tuesday. "It's happened before."
(source: Houston Chronicle)
*******************
DA considers charge as execution probed
As the 1993 execution of a San Antonio man comes under new scrutiny, Bexar
County's district attorney raised the possibility Wednesday of prosecuting
the only eyewitness in the case - the same person who recently came
forward to say Texas executed an innocent man.
The witness, a Mexican national who was shot 9 times on the same night his
friend was murdered, told a jury in 1985 that Ruben Cantu was the killer.
Since then, he has recanted, telling the Houston Chronicle that detectives
pressured him into picking the then-17-year-old Cantu out of a photo
lineup and providing the key testimony that led to the conviction.
Juan Moreno's about-face has thrust San Antonio front and center into the
debate over capital punishment and prompted prosecutors here to dust off
an old file and consider whether it contains a grave mistake.
With Bexar County's inquiry only just begun, District Attorney Susan Reed
said she couldn't predict how it would end or how long it would last, but
she was clear about its focus.
"Did someone commit perjury? That's a crime," Reed said. "Did their
perjury lead to an execution, lead to someone's death? Those are criminal
matters."
Suddenly a subject of international attention, Moreno was visibly
uncomfortable Wednesday as he timidly fielded questions from a crush of
reporters, all the while holding his wife's hand.
Then an undocumented immigrant, Moreno repeatedly failed to pick Cantu out
of a photo lineup but changed stories months after the murder when
detectives twice came back to him with similar lineups.
By then, Cantu had shot an off-duty police officer during a barroom
squabble, reinvigorating investigators' interest in the murder of Moreno's
friend.
"I felt a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure from the court, and I wanted
to get out from under it all," Moreno said in Spanish.
Moreno's attorney, Gerald Goldstein, brushed aside the idea that Moreno
could face any criminal liability for changing his account after so many
years.
Few jurors, Goldstein said, would convict a man who was shot nine times
and was still recovering when police came 3 times to repeatedly show him a
photo lineup that included Cantu.
Besides, Goldstein said, he doubted that Reed would go off "half-cocked"
and charge his client. "I think she's a better politician than that."
Reed was not district attorney when Cantu was prosecuted, but this is not
her 1st encounter with the case. She was a judge in 1987. In fact, she was
one of several judges who reviewed Cantu's appeal and upheld his
conviction.
Both Reed and Goldstein described the ruling as a minor part of the case,
but others believe that someone who previously upheld the conviction
should not now be deciding whether he was wrongfully put to death.
"We definitely want people who can look at it with fresh eyes," said Luis
Figueroa, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational
Fund.
MALDEF and others have asked for the case to be examined by the governor's
Criminal Justice Advisory Council, a newly created panel that is reviewing
various aspects of investigations and prosecutions in Texas.
But Kathy Walt, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said the governor
formed the council to consider broad issues, not individual cases.
That task, she said, would be better handled by Bexar County's district
attorney.
(source: San Antonio Express-News)
***************
SA Man Reiterates Executed Man's Innocence
The lone witness to a fatal shooting in 1984 reiterated Wednesday the
innocence of a San Antonio man who was executed for the crime.
Juan Moreno held a news conference at the offices of his attorney, Gerald
Goldstein, to ask for changes in the judicial process in death penalty
cases.
Through an interpreter, Moreno told reporters that he identified Ruben
Cantu as the triggerman in a robbery that left a man dead and Cantu
wounded because he was afraid and felt pressured by authorities.
Before the news conference, Moreno met with Cantu's mother, who said she
doesn't blame Moreno for her son's death.
Cantu, who professed his innocence during the trial and on death row, was
17 when the crime occurred and 26 when he was executed.
A co-defendant in the case, David Garza, broke his silence to proclaim
Cantu's innocence earlier this month. Garza, who pleaded guilty to
robbery, said that years of guilt made him come forward.
Garza, who is currently serving a prison sentence for another crime, said
that Cantu wasn't with him the night of the armed robbery.
(source: KSAT News)
