A Texas judge froze Ivan Cantu's execution date, which was scheduled for April 26, after the 49-year-old Latino's defense filed a motion claiming his 2001 conviction for a double murder was based on false statements from two witnesses (one, his fiancée) and on dubious evidence.
Cantu was tried for the death of his cousin James Mosqueda, 27, and his girlfriend, Amy Kitchen, 22, in an alleged armed robbery in Dallas;
in 2001 he was sentenced to death.
More than 20 years later, he finally ranks first on death row to be executed, despite suspicions about his case and campaigns on his behalf.
Two jurors who convicted him are now pressing to stop his execution: "I feel the jury was misled or even misled about the facts and evidence," wrote one of them, Maurice Roger Jacob.
Collin County State Judge Benjamin Smith received a defense motion Tuesday gathering new evidence in Cantu's favor and calling for a new trial.
The judge decided to freeze the execution to review it, reported The Texas Tribune.
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Cantu's defense claims that "substantial new evidence" shows that Amy Boettcher, a key prosecution witness and Cantu's then-fiancée, framed him out of fear, to protect herself, with a series of false statements.
The convicted man's mother, Sylvia Cantu, maintains that her son never had the opportunity to prove his innocence, blaming his first team of lawyers, prosecutors and the police.
"My heart is broken," she said at a recent news conference, "I need the county to do the right thing and let her prove his innocence."
Evidence from two decades ago
James Mosqueda's car was found next to Cantu's home after his body was discovered.
When Cantu was out of town, police found bloody pants and socks in his trash can that matched the victims' DNA, according to court documents reviewed by The Texas Tribune.
The gun used in the murders was found at the home of a friend of Cantu's, and the charger had Cantu's fingerprints on it.
But one of the pieces of evidence from the largest prisoner, which linked all the findings, was the testimony of his fiancée, who said that Cantu had told her the night before the bodies were found that he was going to kill them.
Then, she said, her boyfriend left and came back with a swollen face and bloody clothes.
Then they went out dancing.
A reckoning for drugs
Cantu has always defended that he was falsely framed, arguing that Mosqueda was a drug trafficker who was probably besieged by another member of a rival gang to whom he owed money.
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Hours before the bodies were found, Cantu and his fiancée had gone on a trip to her parents' home in Arkansas to plan their wedding.
In a phone call with one of Mosqueda's associates shortly after the killings, which Cantu did not know police were listening to, Cantu said a man dressed as a pizza delivery man had threatened him at his apartment several days earlier saying he was looking for to Mosqueda because he owed him money.
He said he told Mosqueda and Mosqueda asked him to swap his cars to make it look like he wasn't home and someone else was visiting.
Cantu's lawyers say the young man agreed to return to Texas to speak with police, The Texas Tribune reports.
He was arrested when blood-stained clothes were found in his trash.
A watch and a diamond ring
No one else said they saw Cantu's supposed swollen and bloody face mentioned by his fiancée on the night of the murders, according to the lawyers, who also cast doubt on another statement related to a watch by James Mosqueda.
His girlfriend said she saw him throw that watch out the window of his car the night of the murders.
But the watch in question, lawyers say, was found by one of Kitchen's relatives at Mosqueda's home and turned over to police.
They did not know this until 2019.
Ivan Cantu was sentenced to death in Texas in 2001. TDCJ/Getty Images
Lawyers also claim the bride falsely testified that Cantu proposed to her with a diamond ring stolen from Kitchen's body.
But since then, witnesses have said that "Cantu and Amy Boettcher announced her engagement and showed her ring a week before the murders."
The reason for the lies, the lawyers say, was that she was afraid of being framed.
Her stepfather said that she called him after Cantu's arrest and told him: “I'm afraid they're going to kill me.
Get me out of here,” according to the court file.
But the woman is no longer there to support or deny her claims.
Boettcher died in 2021 at age 44, an investigator told The Texas Tribune and is listed in an obituary.
His brother, Jeff Boettcher, had said that Cantu tried to recruit him to "clean up" the evidence when he was planning the murder.
But after his sister's death in 2022, he called investigators to retract.
He told the prosecution that he was high when he spoke to the police and while he was at trial.
The bloody clothes and fingerprints
The lawyers also question the search of Cantu's house in which the bloody clothes were found.
The find was three days after the murders, while Cantu was in Arkansas.
His attorneys say a phone record shows someone used the home phone in his absence, which may indicate evidence was fraudulently planted at the home.
As for his fingerprint on the gun, Cantu has insisted he had never touched it, although he had touched others along with Boettcher in the days before the murders, according to private investigator Matt Duff, who launched a podcast about Cantu's case. in 2020. Duff theorized that he touched a magazine that would later have been used in the murder weapon, since his prints were not on the weapon itself.
