Ivan Cantu had long maintained his innocence, saying a rival drug dealer killed his cousin, James Mosqueda, 27, and Amy Kitchen, Mosqueda’s 22-year-old fiancée, he was convicted guilty by a jury in 2000 of their murders. Since then, Cantu has remained an inmate on death row, awaiting his planned execution on February 28. Kim Kardashian, who has long supported prisoner reforms, awkwardly expressed her support for the case while utilizing false images. The Hulu star shared images of Ivan A. Cantu, a 60-year-old businessman from New York instead of the real inmate. As per The NY Post , the NY project manager used Facebook to alert his friends that Kardashian had misfeatured him on her Instagram account.
“To all my friends and family, I am not getting executed, some idiot who runs @kimkardashian used my picture instead of Ivan ‘Abner’ Cantu,” he wrote as clarification. After a while, the SKIMS founder took down the post from her social media accounts and replaced it with an opinion piece about the death row inmate’s case from the Austin American-Statesman. Additionally, she launched a campaign urging Texas Governor Greg Abbott to postpone the execution of the actual Ivan. As per The US Mirror , the beauty mogul genuinely wants to assist him to get out of jail since he is innocent. Cantu has spent more than 20 years behind bars. She wrote about him on her Instagram story: “I heard about Ivan Cantu’s case from Sister Helen Prejean and was really moved by it. […] ”
She even requested her fans to take action: “The time to act to save Ivan Cantu is now!” Kim also mentioned a recently formed Texas team that examines the justice of convictions. In certain situations, the effort of this team is making prosecutors realize their mistakes. Cantu was found guilty of killings that took place in November 2000. He accused Mosqueda’s rival drug dealer of framing him.
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Additionally, Cantu asserted that the police had taken “witness statements and testimony at face value and didn’t care to investigate the claims,” which he believes led to the fabrication of “false and untruthful information to create a fraudulent narrative” that ultimately resulted in his conviction. As per CBS News , the reality star highlighted prison reform cases in her new documentary Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project , which aired on Oxygen on April 5, 2020.
“What I wanted to do with this documentary is take people along with my journey, how I started off with Alice, non-violent drug offender, to going into people that have done some really serious crimes,” she told CBS This Morning co-host Gayle King in an exclusive interview. “Realizing that their life doesn’t have to be thrown away, that they do deserve a second chance.” “I was very judgmental when I first started this process,” she added. “I didn’t think I had the empathy to support and rally behind someone that had taken someone’s life — when there was a violent crime involved — until I started to educate myself and until I started to go to prisons and meet with people that are incarcerated.”
