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interests / alt.obituaries / Execution: Ivan Cantu

Ivan Abner Cantu, 50, was executed by lethal injection on 28 February
2024 in Huntsville, Texas for the murder and robbery of his cousin and
his cousin's fiance in their home.

James Mosqueda was a mortgage banker in Dallas. Sometime in 1998 or
1999, he hired his cousin, Cantu, to work for him. Mosqueda terminated
Cantu's employment in mid-2000. Mosqueda also dealt cocaine and
marijuana. He lived in north Dallas with his girlfriend, Amy Kitchen.

On 15 October 2000, Cantu, his girlfriend, Amy Boettcher, and her
brother, Jeff Boettcher, moved into an apartment about a mile from
Mosqueda's residence. Later that month, Cantu told Jeff Boettcher that
he intended to kill Mosqueda in order to steal his money and drugs.

On Friday, 3 November 2000, Cantu, then 27, phoned Mosqueda and asked
if he could come over to talk. After hanging up the phone, Cantu told
Amy Boettcher that he was going to kill Mosqueda and Kitchen. He drove
away in his Honda automobile. He returned about an hour later driving
Kitchen's Mercedes. Boettcher observed that his face was swollen and
his clothes were bloody. He told her, "It wasn't pretty." He removed
his blue jeans and instructed Boettcher to put them in a bag. Instead,
she put them in the kitchen garbage can.

As Amy Boettcher testified at Cantu's trial, after Cantu cleaned
himself up on the night of the murders, he made her go with him to
Mosqueda's house to see what he had done. They drove Kitchen's
Mercedes and parked it in the garage. Boettcher testified that she saw
the victims' bodies through the doorway to the master bedroom. Cantu
searched the house for drugs and money. They drove away in Mosqueda's
Corvette and went to Arkansas for a planned visit with her stepfather.
Boettcher testified that Cantu gave her a diamond engagement ring he
had stolen from Kitchen and began telling people that he and Boettcher
were engaged.

On Saturday, the Dallas Fire Department forcibly entered the Mosqueda
residence at the request of Amy Kitchen's mother. They found both
Mosqueda, 27, and Kitchen, 22, dead of multiple gunshot wounds in
their bedroom. Mosqueda was in bed, lying face up, and Kitchen was
lying face down on the floor. There was no sign of forced entry other
than the fire department's. In the course of autopsies, one bullet was
retrieved from Mosqueda's body, and four bullets were retrieved from
Kitchen's.

On 5 November at about 3:00 a.m., Dallas police found Mosqueda's
Chevrolet Corvette parked near Cantu's front door.

On 7 November, police searched Cantu's apartment pursuant to a
warrant. They found a set of keys. One opened a door to Mosqueda's
house. Another operated Kitchen's Mercedes. The police also found
bloody jeans and socks in the kitchen garbage can. DNA testing matched
the blood on the jeans to Mosqueda and the blood on the socks to
Kitchen.

On 9 November, police recovered a .380 caliber semiautomatic pistol
from the home of Tawny Svihovec, Cantu's former girlfriend.
Fingerprints on the weapon were matched to Cantu. Blood on the barrel
was matched to Mosqueda. Ballistics testing matched the weapon to the
bullets recovered from the victims' bodies.

Boettcher further testified that the night before the murders, she and
Cantu had argued. In his anger, Cantu shot a pistol at her head. When
she tried to leave, he slammed the door on her hand, held the gun to
her head, and told her he was "serious."

Cantu's first wife, Michelle Traister, testified that during their
marriage, Cantu threw her to the floor, beat her head against concrete
and tile surfaces, choked her, and threatened to kill her.

The defense theorized that Mosqueda and Kitchen were murdered by rival
drug dealers, who framed Cantu as the killer. The defense disputed the
credibility of the state's principal witness, Amy Boettcher, who was a
"doper."

A jury found Cantu guilty of capital murder in October 2001 and
sentenced him to death. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed
the conviction and sentence in 2004.

Cantu maintained his innocence in his appeals. In 2011, the U.S.
Supreme Court granted him a stay of execution based on his claim of
ineffective assistance of counsel. The lower courts reconsidered his
case and then upheld his conviction and death sentence.

Following Amy Boettcher's death in 2021, Cantu's lawyers raised new
appeals challenging her credibility and seeking additional DNA
testing. He received another stay of execution in 2023. The courts
subsequently rejected his claims on the merits and allowed his
execution to be rescheduled.

Cantu's case was recently publicized in a podcast called "Cousins By
Blood." Celebrities including Kim Kardashian and Martin Sheen joined
activists advocating for another stay of execution based on what they
called "new evidence."

In a last-ditch round of appeals this week, Cantu's lawyers re-raised
the same claims as in 2023. This time, they were rejected outright. In
a concurring opinion issued the day before Cantu's execution, Judge
Edith Jones of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decried the
"gamesmanship" of Cantu and his attorneys.

"A reasonable person must conclude that the primary reason for raising
these claims at the eleventh hour is to beleaguer the courts and cause
some jurist somewhere to blink and grant a stay of execution," Jones
wrote.

"I want you to know that I never killed James and Amy," Cantu said
from the death chamber to Kitchen's friends and relatives who came to
witness his execution. "And if I did, if I knew who did, you would've
been the first to know any information I would've had that would've
helped to bring justice to James and Amy I would've shared."

Cantu announced that his execution was not going to bring closure to
the victims' loved ones. "This is not going to help you guys and I
want you to know from me that it never occurred. No. I want all of you
to know that I did not kill James and Amy."

Next, Cantu thanked his attorney, his mother, and Sister Helen
Prejean, his spiritual advisor, who was at his side during his
execution. He finished his last statement at 6:23 p.m. and told the
warden he was ready. The lethal injection was then started. He stopped
breathing at 6:29 p.m. He was pronounced dead at 6:47 p.m.

David Carson
(Sources: Texas Department of Criminal Justice, court documents,
Associated Press, Huntsville Item.)
--
Texas Execution Information
www.txexecutions.org

In article <q4a1uilo7vupshj8r2k2or76c2da35n971@4ax.com>,
David Carson <davidc@wa-wd.com> wrote:
>Ivan Abner Cantu, 50, was executed by lethal injection on 28 February
>2024 in Huntsville, Texas for the murder and robbery of his cousin and
>his cousin's fiance in their home.
>
>James Mosqueda was a mortgage banker in Dallas. Sometime in 1998 or
>1999, he hired his cousin, Cantu, to work for him. Mosqueda terminated
>Cantu's employment in mid-2000. Mosqueda also dealt cocaine and
>marijuana. He lived in north Dallas with his girlfriend, Amy Kitchen.

Interesting, as always.

Also, check out:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/24/what-i-learned-about-the-us-death-penalty-from-the-next-man-to-be-executed

for an alternative view.

--
Politics is show business for ugly people.

Sports is politics for stupid people.

In the previous article, Kenny McCormack <gazelle@shell.xmission.com> wrote:
> Interesting, as always.
>
> Also, check out:
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/24/what-i-learned-about-the-us-death-penalty-from-the-next-man-to-be-executed
>
> for an alternative view.

If by "alternative view" you mean "misrepresentation and half-truths,"
sure.

Right off the bat we get this whopper:

That story is complicated. Cantu was convicted of killing his
cousin and his cousin's fiancÃ©e in November 2000 as a result of a
drug dispute. But he's always denied it. There was no physical
evidence proving he was at the crime scene -- no fingerprints,
shoe prints, DNA. And he was hundreds of miles away at his
fiancÃ©e's parents' house in Arkansas when the bodies of James
Mosqueda, 27, and Amy Kitchen, 22, were discovered in their Dallas
home, riddled with bullets. Yet Cantu's jeans and socks, which
police found in his rubbish bin, had the victims' blood on them,
and Cantu's fiancÃ©e, Amy Boettcher, told police he had shown her
the bodies.

This is saved from being a *blatant* lie by the word "proving." There
was tremendous physical evidence in this case linking Cantu to the
crime scene and to the crime itself. But, sure, the victims' blood on
his clothes isn't absolute, metaphysical-certainty proof by itself
that he was there when the actual murders took place. Possession of
the key to a victim's car is "physical evidence." So is possession of
the engagement ring.

"No fingerprints" is absolutely bullshit: Cantu's fingerprints were
on the magazine of the murder weapon. (Criminals often forget to wipe
down bullets, magazines, internals -- even if they wipe the exterior
of the weapon itself clean.) The author kind of casually throws out
"no fingerprints" hoping the reader will conclude that there was no
fingerprint evidence in the case at all. And so on. I'm not going to
hit all of even the *obvious* points here. This is an article written
with the deliberate objective of deceiving the reader.

Same for the downright silly "ineffective counsel" claim. As any
lawyer will know, the anecdote he introduces is meaningless:

During his trial, Cantu's lawyer did not call any witnesses in his
defence,

Well, when there are no witnesses who can offer a defense of your
plainly guilty-as-sin client, that's who you call. I have read some
of the transcripts in this case, and Cantu's lawyer's
cross-examination of prosecution witnesses was robust and quite
competent. He avoided giving them the opportunity to "bolster" their
statements on direct, without letting them get away with ambiguity or
vagueness.

and before the jury considered its verdict, he all but told them
his client was responsible: "I didn't say he was innocent," he
said. "I said he's not guilty of capital murder" -- a legal
distinction he hoped would save Cantu from a death sentence. It
didn't.

This is a pretty unremarkable thing for a lawyer to say. Hell, I've
been a juror in a serious criminal case where the defense lawyer had
to admit kmuch more than she would like to have admitted, just to
avoid wrecking her own credibility before she even made her
reasonable-doubt pitch. It's called making the best of a bad
situation, and any competent lawyer will do it.

I will at least say that his anti-death-penalty musings are reasonable
and thoughtful apart from the last bits. I don't agree with them, but
I don't object to them as inherently dishonest. But his factual
representations about Cantu and his case are *very* dishonest. He
should be ashamed, and so should the Guardian.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone objects to any statement I make, I am
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / baldwin@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it.-T. Lehrer
***~~~~----------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject	Author
Execution: Ivan Cantu	David Carson
Re: Execution: Ivan Cantu	Kenny McCormack
Re: Execution: Ivan Cantu	J.D. Baldwin
Re: Execution: Ivan Cantu	David Carson