JUST IN: Ruben Cardenas EXECUTED After 20 Years on Death Row | Final Words & DNA Controversy….

On the night of November 8th, 2017, Reuben Cardanis was supposed to die at 6:00. 6:00 came and went. Inside the Huntsville unit, known to the people who work there simply as the walls, the execution team waited in a building most Texans will never see the inside of. A death chamber inside that unit has hosted more executions than almost any other room in the country.

 And on this particular night, the routine that usually runs on schedule had stalled. Outside the prison walls, lawyers in Austin and Washington kept filing emergency appeals, one after another, each one asking the same question in slightly different legal language. Stop this execution and allow one final DNA test.

 The Mexican government had already condemned the case as illegal. Officials in Mexico City said Texas was about to violate an international court ruling. Diplomats had been raising the alarm for weeks. None of it had changed anything yet, but none of it had gone away either. At the center of the fight was a single request that Reuben Cardanus had been making in one form or another for years. Test the evidence again.

 Texas had refused. That refusal was controversial for a specific reason. 20 years earlier, Reuben Cardinus had confessed. He had told police what happened to his teenage cousin, Myra Lagona, and he had led detectives to the place where they found her body. For a while, the case looked closed. But somewhere between that confession and this night in the Huntsville death chamber, Reuben changed his story.

 He said the confession had come after hours of exhausting interrogation. He said the physical evidence did not line up with what the state claimed happened. And right up until the end, he insisted someone else was responsible for Myra’s death. At around 10:00, 4 hours after his execution had originally been scheduled, the United States Supreme Court issued its ruling.

 Texas could proceed. Before Reuben Cardanis was walked into the death chamber that night, this case had already become far more complicated than a simple story of a crime, a confession, and a death sentence. Because by 2017, the question was no longer only whether Reubin had killed Myra Lagona. The question was why Texas was willing to execute him without running the one test his lawyers said could settle it and whether 20 years after a 15year-old girl disappeared from her own bedroom in Macallen the state’s certainty was worth more than the last

thing his legal team ever asked for. Myra Lagona was 15 years old though for the rest of her life to be recorded in official paperwork as 16. one of several small inconsistencies that would follow this case for two decades. She lived with her family in a public housing complex in Macallen, Texas in the Rio Grand Valley, close enough to the Mexican border that the two countries blurred into each other in daily life.

She shared a bedroom with her younger sister, Roxanna. February 22nd, 1997 was an ordinary Saturday night in South Texas. The Rio Grand Valley in late February sits somewhere between winter and spring. Warm enough during the day that families leave windows unlatched. Cool enough at night that most people don’t think twice about it.

 Myra went to bed the way she always did. In the room she shared with her sister, in the apartment where she’d grown up, in a housing complex where most of the families knew each other well enough to nod hello in the parking lot. Sometime before dawn, that changed. Roxanna woke in the dark to find someone in the room. She would later tell investigators what she saw.

 her sister’s mouth taped shut, her hands bound, a man moving her toward the window. Roxanna was a child watching another child being taken with no way to stop it and no way to fully understand in that moment what she was witnessing. Outside in the apartment complex, a woman would later tell police she had seen a man walking with a teenage girl who was barefoot dressed only in a shirt and underwear in the hours before sunrise. She called it in.

 By the time the sun came up over the Rio Grand Valley, Myra Lagona was gone. Her parents reported her missing that same morning, February 22. The first and only witness to how she disappeared was her little sister, still lying a few feet from an empty bed. Myra’s disappearance triggered the kind of investigation small Texas counties are built to handle rarely, if ever.

 Police in Hidalgo County began working the case immediately, and in cases like this, investigators almost always start close to home. Reuben Ramirez Cardinas was 26 years old. He had been born across the border in Guanauato, Mexico, but had grown up in the Rio Grand Valley and lived in Edinburg, a short drive from where Myra’s family lived in Macallen.

He had completed the 11th grade, worked as a laborer, and had no prior prison record. He was on paper and in person an unremarkable young man from a border town where families like his and Myers had lived for generations, moving back and forth across a border that was more of a formality than a wall between two separate lives.

 He was also Mera’s first cousin. He had grown up around her family, had been at gatherings with her, had spent time with her the way relatives in a close-knit extended family do. He was not someone who could be ruled out by simple proximity, and he was not someone Mera’s family would have thought to fear. That familiarity would work against him almost immediately.

Investigators brought him in voluntarily on the morning was reported missing, February 22nd, 1997. He stayed at the police station for more than 10 hours that day. Questioned in shifts by nine different law enforcement officers about where his cousin might be and what he knew about her disappearance.

 By evening, with nothing to hold him on, he was released without being charged. At the same time, police were talking to another young man from Edinburg, Reubin’s friend, Jose Antonio Lopez Castillo, known to people around him as Tony. Castillo was in his mid20s as well. And like Reuben, he had spent part of that Saturday night in Edinburg’s small strip of bars and lounges before the two men crossed paths at a place called the Cubby Lounge.

 The two men had spent part of that Saturday night together. Police had even stopped Reuben and Tony earlier that night at a Circle K convenience store, judged them too drunk to be driving, and told them to find a sober friend to get them home. For a short while, they did exactly that.

 What happened after that stop, where the two men went and who was in the car when they got there, would become one of the central threads of the entire case, argued over in courtrooms for the next two decades. For now, the investigation had begun with one missing teenager. Within 24 hours, it was turning toward two men who knew her well, one of whom had grown up calling her family.

 The break in the case came from Tony Castillo, not from any piece of physical evidence. Castillo admitted to investigators that he and Reuben had been involved in taking Myra from her family’s apartment. Once Castillo implicated his friend, police arrested Reuben Cardanis. On February 23rd, 1997, one day after Myra’s disappearance, Reuben gave police a statement.

 He described the night in detail, leaving the Cubby lounge in Edinburg, running into Castillo, driving around with friends, being stopped by police at the Circle K, and then after dropping off the friend who’d been designated to drive, going back to his own house to pick up a bottle of liquor before getting back on the road with Castillo.

From there, his account described the two of them driving to the apartment where Mea lived about 10 miles away in Macallen and taking her from her bedroom. Reuben told police he had been high on cocaine that night. He said he and Castillo drove Myra to a remote area in his mother’s car, that he had sex with her, and that when he untied her to let her go, she came at him, scratching him, kneing him, and that he lost his temper and began hitting her.

 He described her coughing up blood, struggling to breathe, and him trying and failing to revive her. He said he then tied her back up and rolled her body down the bank of a canal. He led detectives to that canal himself. Her body was found there, near a lake in the Rio Grand Valley, exactly where his statement said it would be.

 Not a location investigators had already searched and simply confirmed, but a spot that came from him. For investigators and for the Hidalgo County prosecutors who would eventually try this case, this looked like a solved crime. A confession, a body recovered based on that confession and a codefendant who had already implicated him.

 In the space of 2 days, the case had gone from a family reporting a missing teenager to a full arrest with a signed statement and a recovered body. By any ordinary measure, it was a fast resolution to a case that could easily have dragged on for months without a break. What nobody in that police station on February 23rd, 1997 could have predicted was how long the argument over that one statement would last, or how far it would eventually travel from a Hidalgo County courtroom to the International Court of Justice in the Netherlands and back again. But the

statement that seemed to close the case in February of 1997 would become the single most contested piece of evidence in a legal fight that lasted almost 20 years. Strip away the competing legal arguments. And here is what the state of Texas told a Hidalgo County jury happened to Moa Lagona. On the night of February 21 into the early hours of February 22, 1997, Reuben Cardinus entered the bedroom Myra shared with her sister through a window.

He restrained her, binding her hands and covering her mouth with duct tape so she could not call out. He and Castillo then moved her out of the apartment and into a vehicle. They drove her away from Macallen to an isolated area of the Rio Grand Valley. There, according to the state’s case, Reuben sexually assaulted his cousin, beat her severely, and strangled her until she died.

 Afterward, he disposed of her body by rolling it down the bank of a canal where it entered the water near a lake. That was the account presented to the jury. A planned abduction that ended in rape and murder, carried out by someone Myra knew and trusted enough to be caught off guard in the middle of the night in the room where she should have been safest.

The canal where her body was found sat near a lake in the Rio Grand Valley, in an area far enough from Macallen that a search would not have found her quickly without someone leading the way. It was a place Reuben knew. That detail, a killer who knew the ground he was standing on, became one of the state’s central arguments for why his story could be trusted, even as his lawyers argued that same familiarity could be explained other ways.

 Reuben’s own account, the one he gave police within a day of his arrest, described something different in its details. A night that started with her going along with a plan and ended in a physical fight he said he never intended. The prosecution’s case and Reubin’s own statement to police were not identical stories.

 They shared a body of evidence and a location, but not a motive and not a level of premeditation. A jury would eventually have to decide which version, if either, they believed, and by extension whether the difference between the two even mattered under Texas law. For years after his 1998 conviction, Reuben Cardinus and his legal team worked to undermine the very statement that had helped put him on death row.

 Their argument centered on the conditions of his interrogation. His attorney, Mari Levan, argued that Reubin had repeatedly asked for a lawyer and that the state did not appoint him counsel for 11 days. 11 days during which he remained subject to police questioning and gave a series of statements that, according to his legal team, were inconsistent with each other and inconsistent with the physical evidence recovered from the scene.

Leaven’s language in later court filings was direct. She argued the case bore all the indicia of a wrongful conviction pointing to what she called questionable eyewitness testimony, a coerced and uncountled confession, and unreliable forensic evidence. Reubin’s own public account of that night shifted over time as well.

 In a 1997 interview with a local South Texas television station, he offered a version that diverged sharply from both his police statement and the state’s theory at trial. In that interview, he said Myra had asked him to help her fake her own kidnapping so she could get away from home. He said the two of them argued outside of town.

 He claimed the argument was about her wanting to marry him and that the disagreement turned physical. By the time I knew it, he said, she was already just laying there. He described dumping her body in the canal in a panic, not as part of a planned assault. None of these accounts, the police statement, the television interview, and his later claims of innocence, matched cleanly.

 In one version, Meera asked to be taken away. In another, he described sexual contact and a fight that turned deadly after he tried to release her. In his final years, he abandoned both versions and said outright that he had not killed her at all. That responsibility belonged to someone else.

 That inconsistency became the foundation of his appeals. If the confession could not be trusted, his lawyers argued, then the case rested on far less than it appeared to on paper. His attorneys also pointed to the broader pattern in cases involving young Spanish-speaking suspects questioned for extended periods without counsel.

 A pattern, they argued that had produced false or unreliable confessions in other Texas cases over the years. They were not asking a jury or a court to believe Reubin was simply telling the truth. Now after lying then they were asking whether any of his statements given under those conditions deserved to be trusted at all.

 But that argument raised its own question, one that Reubin’s legal team had to answer directly. If he had nothing to do with Myra’s death, how did he know exactly where to lead detectives to find her body? Prosecutors treated that single fact as the strongest evidence in the entire case, stronger in their view than any inconsistency in his later statements.

Strip away the confession entirely and ask what else tied Reuben Cardinus to Mayor Lagona’s death. Both sides in this case, for very different reasons, wanted the answer to that question examined closely. There was Roxanna’s account, a child eyewitness who described a man taking her sister through their bedroom window in the dark, though she did not identify the intruder by name in her earliest statements to police.

There was the woman from the housing complex who reported seeing a man walking with a barefoot teenage girl dressed only in a shirt and underwear. There was Tony Castillo, Reubin’s friend, who admitted his own role in the abduction and whose statement to police first pointed investigators toward Reuben.

 There was hair and forensic evidence collected at the time. Evidence that would later become the subject of enormous dispute over how it was tested and what, if anything, it definitively proved. And there was the fact that Reuben Cardanis led detectives directly to the canal where Myra’s body was recovered. Information prosecutors argued only the person responsible could have known.

 Set against all of that, Reubin’s defense team pointed to what was missing. They argued there was no physical evidence directly linking him to the crime scene beyond his own statement. They said there was no forensic evidence confirming a sexual assault had occurred despite the rape conviction. And they argued the eyewitnesses closest to the abduction, including Roxanna, who knew Reuben personally as a member of the family, either failed to identify him or describe someone whose appearance did not match him.

 The state saw a consistent picture. A confession corroborated by a body found exactly where the confession said it would be, supported by a codefendant’s admission and circumstantial evidence surrounding the abduction. Prosecutors argued that no single piece of evidence needed to stand alone because together they formed a chain that pointed in one direction only.

 The defense saw a case built almost entirely on a single disputed statement, dressed up with evidence that did not hold together as tightly as it first appeared. They noted that Roxanna, the witness with the closest possible view of what happened that night, never identified Reuben by name in her earliest statements, a detail that should have carried real weight given that she knew her own cousin’s face and voice.

 They argued that the housing complex witness’s description of the man she saw did not clearly match Reuben either. And they returned again and again to the absence of forensic confirmation of a sexual assault in a case where the sexual assault charge was central to making it a capital offense at all. Both sides were in a sense arguing about the same handful of facts.

What divided them was how much weight each fact could bear on its own and whether a case this heavily dependent on one contested statement should have carried a death sentence in the first place. Reuben Cardinus stood trial in Hidalgo County on a charge of capital murder based on the theory that Myra’s killing occurred during the commission of another serious offense, kidnapping and sexual assault.

 Under Texas law, that combination is what separates a capital case, one eligible for the death penalty from an ordinary murder charge. The prosecution’s case leaned on his own statement to police, the location of the body, and the surrounding circumstantial evidence, Castillo’s admission, the eyewitness accounts from the apartment complex, and the fact that Reuben had led detectives to the canal himself.

 His defense challenged the reliability of the confession, pointed to the 11 days before he was appointed counsel, and argued the forensic evidence did not support the state’s theory of the crime as tightly as prosecutors claimed. The jury did not agree with the defense. In February 1998, they convicted Reuben Cardanis of capital murder.

 During the punishment phase that followed, prosecutors and defense attorneys presented additional evidence and argument aimed at a narrower question. Not whether Reubin was guilty, but whether he should live or die for it. Jurors answered Texas’s special sentencing questions, questions about future dangerousness and mitigating circumstances in a way that required the judge to impose a death sentence.

 Tony Castillo, the friend who had implicated him and admitted his own role, faced a different outcome entirely. He was convicted of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to 25 years in prison, a sentence that reflected the state’s position that Reuben, not Castillo, had personally committed the sexual assault and the killing.

 One man received 25 years. The other was sentenced to death. The difference came down to the state’s theory of who did what in the final fatal moments, a distinction the jury accepted and one Reubin’s lawyers would spend the next two decades trying to unravel. On July 29th, 1998, Reuben Ramirez Cardinus was received on Texas death row. He was 28 years old.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction and sentence in April 2000, closing off his direct appeal and opening the much longer road of federal habius litigation that would follow. Reuben Cardinus was a Mexican citizen. Under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, a treaty the United States has signed and is bound by, foreign nationals arrested in this country are supposed to be informed of their right to contact their home country’s consulate.

 That never happened for Reuben. He was not told he could seek help from Mexican officials, and the Mexican consulate was not notified of his arrest. It would take 5 months before Mexico learned that one of its citizens was facing a capital murder charge in South Texas. By the time Mexico’s government got involved, providing funding and legal support through attorney Mari Levan and the Mexican Capital Legal Assistance Program, Reuben had already given his statement, already stood trial, and already been sentenced to die.

 His case became one of 51 folded into a landmark international ruling. Mexico had brought the case to the World Court in the Hague, arguing on behalf of dozens of its citizens facing execution in American prisons, all of whom had been denied their consular rights after arrest. In 2004, the International Court of Justice issued its judgment in the case known as Avena and other Mexican nationals, United States, finding that the US had violated its consular notification obligations toward these citizens, Reuben included. The court

ruled that the United States had breached article 36 of the Vienna Convention by failing to inform Reuben of his rights and by failing to notify the Mexican consular post of his detention. As a remedy, the ICJ ordered that each of the 51 men receive judicial review and reconsideration to determine whether the treaty violation had affected the outcome of their trials.

That ruling should have mattered. In practice, it collided with the American legal systems own rules about how international law applies domestically. In 2008, in a related case involving another Mexican national named Joseé Ernesto Medigene, convicted in the rape and murder of two teenage girls in Houston.

 The United States Supreme Court ruled that the ICJ’s decision while representing a genuine international law obligation was not automatically enforcable against individual states unless Congress passed legislation making it so. Congress never did. The practical effect of Medigene versus Texas was to leave the Avena ruling as a statement of international law with no binding mechanism to force American courts to act on it, no matter how many governments objected.

 Reuben Cardinus never received the judicial review the World Court had ordered on his behalf. Mexico called this a serious breach of international law. Texas and the federal courts held that no foreign tribunal could override a lawful state conviction absent action from the US Congress. By 2017, Reubin had lost in the Texas courts, lost in the federal courts, and lost in the political arena.

 One avenue remained. As Reuben Cardinas’s execution date approached in the fall of 2017, his legal strategy narrowed to a single specific request. Retest the physical evidence using DNA technology that had not existed or had not been reliable enough to use back in 1997 and 1998. Forensic science had changed enormously in the two decades since his trial.

testing methods that could isolate a usable genetic profile from a small or degraded sample. Methods routine in police labs by 2017 simply were not available to Hidalgo County investigators when Myra’s case was first built. His attorneys pointed to specific untested items. scrapings taken from under Myra’s fingernails, a hair recovered from the scene, blood samples collected from within her family’s home.

None of it, they said, had ever undergone the kind of DNA analysis available two decades later. They argued that a conviction resting so heavily on a disputed confession deserved one final modern check against the physical record. of the Hidalgo County prosecutors saw the request differently. They argued the DNA petition was a delay tactic intended, in the state’s words, to muddy the waters rather than uncover the truth.

 They pointed to the fact that Reuben himself had led investigators to the crime scene, providing detail that had never been made public, information they said only the person responsible could have known. On October 25th, 2017, a Hidalgo County judge denied the motion for DNA testing. Rubin’s team appealed to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, filing two separate motions in the same week, one asking the court to reverse the district court’s denial of testing, the other seeking relief and a new hearing altogether. Both were denied.

 A judge also rejected a lastminute request to postpone the execution date itself, clearing the way for the November 8th date to stand. This was the argument at the heart of the case in its final weeks. Not whether DNA evidence existed, but whether a new result could plausibly change what a jury had already decided nearly 20 years earlier.

 Texas’s position was that even a favorable DNA result would not prove innocence given the weight of the confession and the corroborating evidence already in the record. Reubin’s lawyers argued the opposite calculus, that executing a man while testable evidence sat in an evidence room never run through modern methods was a risk the state should not be willing to take, particularly in a case that had already drawn an international ruling over how it had been handled.

Outside the courtroom, the case had become a genuine diplomatic dispute. Human rights organizations wrote letters. Legal observers in Mexico and the United States tracked the appeals as they moved through the system. None of it slowed the calendar. By early November, Reubin’s legal team was no longer fighting for a new trial.

 They were fighting for enough time to run one test and running out of courts willing to grant it. Ruben Cardinus’s execution was scheduled for 6:00 in the evening on November 8th, 2017 at the Huntsville Walls unit. That morning and into the afternoon, the case reached its widest audience yet.

 2 days earlier, in a press conference in Mexico City, Carlos Sarda, Mexico’s deputy foreign minister for North America, had called the looming execution an illegal act. rooted, he said, in a failure that stretched back to the very start of the case. The Interamerican Commission on Human Rights had already granted what are known as precautionary measures, a formal request that the United States hold off on the execution until Reubin’s international petition could be fully considered.

Human rights lawyer Gregory Kuikanddal representing Mexico’s interests in the case told reporters that what separated a functioning justice system from disorder was exactly the kind of due process he argued Reubin had been denied. None of it stopped the clock. 6:00 passed with Reuben still in his cell.

 His final appeals still pending before the courts. Attorneys filed a flurry of last day motions with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and the federal courts, asking again for the DNA testing and again for a stay. Each was denied in turn, one court passing the case to the next. The case moved to the United States Supreme Court.

 For nearly 4 hours, the execution sat in limbo while the justices considered the final requests. The Huntsville unit’s death chamber prepared and waiting. Media gathered outside and mayor’s family carrying two decades of waiting into what was supposed to be its final night. At approximately 10:00 that night, the Supreme Court denied the remaining appeals. Texas was cleared to proceed.

Reuben Cardinus was taken into the execution chamber. He was strapped to the gurnie. The warden asked if he had a final statement to give aloud. The lethal dose of pentobarbatital began. Reuben, eyes closed, took a couple of breaths, mumbled briefly, and began snoring. Within less than a minute, all mo

vement stopped. At 10:26 p.m. Central time, Reuben Ramirez Cardinus was pronounced dead. He was 47 years old, the seventh person executed in Texas that year. When the warden asked Reuben directly whether he wished to make a final statement, he did not speak. According to the official Texas Department of Criminal Justice record, no oral statement is listed for that night, but Reuben had prepared something in writing and it was released afterward as his official last statement.

 This is my statement, my final words. First, I want to thank my family for believing in me and being there with me till the end. I love you all very much and I know that you love me too. Life does go on. Next, I would like to also thank my attorneys Mory Levan, Alicia Ames Rodriguez, and Sandra Babcock for all their hard work they have done to help me out.

 I am so thankful. I would also like to thank the Mexican council for all their help too and every government official that was trying to help me out too. Thank you Marisella Luna and Julia Thim for being such good friends now. I will not and cannot apologize for someone else’s crime. But I will be back for justice.

You can count on that. Thank you with respect. Reuben Cardinus. He thanked the people who had spent years fighting for him, his family, his attorneys, the Mexican consulate, two friends he named directly. He did not apologize to the family of the 15-year-old girl he had once confessed to killing, and he closed his statement with a line that read, “To many who heard about it afterward, less like a farewell than a threat.

” By 2017, Myra Lagona’s family had been waiting nearly 20 years for this case to reach an end. Whatever the international disputes, the treaty violations, and the unresolved DNA questions meant to lawyers, diplomats, and courts, for Mera’s family, the case had only ever been about one thing, the sister and daughter who was taken from her bedroom in the dark on a February night in 1997 and never came home.

 Reuben Cardinas was not sentenced to death on DNA evidence. He was convicted on the strength of his own statement to police, the discovery of Meera’s body exactly where he said it would be, a codefendant’s admission, and the surrounding circumstantial evidence gathered by investigators in the days after her disappearance.

 A Hidalgo County jury weighed that evidence in 1998 and reached a unanimous verdict. Every level of Texas and federal appellet review upheld it. But Texas also executed him without ever running the DNA test his lawyers spent his final years asking for. The fingernail scrapings, the hair, the blood samples, none of it was ever retested with modern methods before November 8th, 2017.

That leaves an honest question sitting at the center of this case, one that no court ever fully answered. Would that testing have exposed a wrongful conviction? Or would it have simply confirmed what a Hidalgo County jury had already decided two decades earlier? Because the evidence was never retested, that question outlived the man Texas executed.

 What is not in question is who Myra Lagona was before any of this happened. She was 15 years old. She lived with her family in Macallen, Texas, and shared a bedroom with a younger sister who loved her enough to remember for the rest of her life, exactly what she saw on the night Myra disappeared. She never got the chance to grow older than that.

 Whatever doubts remain about the legal process that followed her death, that is where this case begins and ends with a teenager who vanished from her own bedroom and a family that spent two decades waiting for the case to reach its final chapter. Two governments argued over consular rights and treaty obligations.

 Courts in Texas, in Washington, and in the Hague weighed in on procedure and precedent. None of those institutions were built to answer the question that mattered most to the people who knew Myra Lagona before any of this started. What her life would have looked like if that Saturday night in February 1997 had ended the way every other Saturday night had ended before it, with her asleep in her own bed and her sister asleep beside her.

 If this case raised questions for you the way it raised them for investigators, courts, and two governments over 20 years, subscribe for more cases like this one, where the evidence is rarely as simple as it first appears. is.