Ruben Cardenas was executed by lethal injection in Texas on Wednesday night, ending a 20-year legal battle that drew international condemnation and left unresolved questions about DNA evidence and a disputed confession.

 

The execution, originally scheduled for 6 p. m. at the Huntsville Unit, was delayed for four hours as his legal team filed emergency appeals to the U.

S. Supreme Court, seeking a stay to allow one final DNA test on evidence from the 1997 murder of his teenage cousin, Myra Lagona.

 

 

At approximately 10 p. m. , the Supreme Court denied the remaining appeals, clearing the way for Texas to proceed.

Cardenas, 47, was pronounced ᴅᴇᴀᴅ at 10:26 p. m. Central Time, becoming the seventh person executed in Texas in 2017.

 

 

 

In his final written statement, released after his death, Cardenas thanked his family, his attorneys, and the Mexican consulate for their support. He did not apologize to the family of Myra Lagona, and he closed with a line that read, “I will not and cannot apologize for someone else’s crime. But I will be back for justice.

You can count on that.”

 

 

The case has been marked by controversy from the start. Cardenas, a Mexican citizen, was convicted in 1998 of capital murder for the abduction, rape, and murder of his 15-year-old cousin. The prosecution relied heavily on his confession, which he later recanted, claiming it was coerced after hours of interrogation without an attorney.

 

 

 

Myra Lagona disappeared from her bedroom in a public housing complex in McAllen, Texas, on February 22, 1997. Her younger sister, Roxanna, told police she saw a man binding Myra’s hands and covering her mouth with duct tape before taking her through a window.

 

 

Police arrested Cardenas the next day after his friend, Tony Castillo, implicated him. Cardenas gave a detailed statement, leading detectives to a canal where Myra’s body was found. He said he had been high on cocaine, had 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with her, and then beat her when she fought back.

 

 

 

But over the years, Cardenas changed his story. He said the confession came after exhausting interrogation and that the physical evidence did not match the state’s account. He insisted someone else was responsible for Myra’s death.

 

 

 

His legal team argued that the confession was unreliable and that the state had violated his rights under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by failing to notify the Mexican consulate of his arrest. The International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled in 2004 that the United States had breached its obligations and ordered judicial review for Cardenas and 50 other Mexican nationals.

 

 

But the U. S. Supreme Court ruled in a related case that the ICJ decision was not automatically enforceable against individual states without congressional action.

Congress never acted, and Texas proceeded with the execution.

 

 

In the final months before his death, Cardenas’s legal strategy narrowed to a single request: retest the physical evidence using modern DNA technology. They pointed to fingernail scrapings, hair samples, and blood from the crime scene that had never been analyzed with methods available in 2017.

 

 

Hidalgo County prosecutors opposed the request, calling it a delay tactic. They argued that the confession and the location of the body provided overwhelming evidence of guilt. A district judge denied the motion in October 2017, and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld that decision.

 

 

 

On the day of the execution, Mexico’s deputy foreign minister called the execution “an illegal act.” The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had granted precautionary measures asking the United States to halt the execution, but Texas ignored the request.

 

 

Human rights organizations and legal observers tracked the appeals as they moved through the system. Each court denied the stay requests, pᴀssing the case to the next level until the Supreme Court issued its final ruling.

 

 

Inside the Huntsville Unit, the execution team waited in the death chamber, a room that has hosted more executions than almost any other in the country. The routine that usually runs on schedule had stalled as lawyers in Austin and Washington filed emergency appeals.

 

 

The Mexican government had condemned the case for weeks, saying Texas was about to violate an international court ruling. Diplomats raised alarms, but none of it changed the outcome.

 

 

At the center of the fight was a single question: Why was Texas willing to execute Cardenas without running the one test his lawyers said could settle the case? The state’s position was that even a favorable DNA result would not prove innocence given the weight of the confession and corroborating evidence.

 

 

Reuben Cardenas was born in Guanajuato, Mexico, but grew up in the Rio Grande Valley. He completed the 11th grade, worked as a laborer, and had no prior prison record. He was Myra’s first cousin, and the two families had lived in the same border community for generations.

 

 

 

On the night of Myra’s disappearance, Cardenas and Castillo had been drinking at a bar in Edinburg. Police stopped them at a Circle K convenience store, judged them too drunk to drive, and told them to find a sober friend. They did, but later returned to the road.

 

 

 

Castillo admitted to investigators that he and Cardenas had taken Myra from her apartment. He was convicted of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Cardenas received the death penalty.

 

 

 

The difference in sentences came down to the state’s theory that Cardenas, not Castillo, had personally committed the Sєxual ᴀssault and the killing. That distinction was critical under Texas law, which makes a murder capital if it occurs during a kidnapping or Sєxual ᴀssault.

 

 

During the trial, the prosecution presented evidence that Cardenas had led detectives to the canal where Myra’s body was found. They argued that only the killer could have known that location. The defense countered that Cardenas knew the area because he had grown up nearby.

 

 

 

Roxanna, Myra’s sister, was the only eyewitness to the abduction. She described a man taking her sister through the window but did not identify Cardenas by name in her earliest statements. The defense argued that this was significant because Roxanna knew her cousin’s face and voice.

 

 

 

A woman from the housing complex reported seeing a man walking with a barefoot teenage girl dressed only in a shirt and underwear in the hours before sunrise. She called police, but her description did not clearly match Cardenas, according to his lawyers.

 

 

Forensic evidence collected at the time included hair samples and blood from the family’s home. The defense argued that no physical evidence directly linked Cardenas to the crime scene beyond his own statement. They also noted that there was no forensic confirmation of a Sєxual ᴀssault, despite the rape conviction.

 

 

 

Prosecutors maintained that the case was consistent: a confession corroborated by a body found exactly where the confession said it would be, supported by a codefendant’s admission and circumstantial evidence. They argued that no single piece of evidence needed to stand alone because together they formed a chain pointing to Cardenas.

 

 

The jury convicted Cardenas of capital murder in February 1998. During the punishment phase, they answered Texas’s special sentencing questions in a way that required the judge to impose a death sentence. He was received on death row on July 29, 1998, at age 28.

 

 

 

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed his conviction and sentence in April 2000. His direct appeal closed, and the long road of federal habeas litigation began. Over the next 17 years, his legal team filed numerous appeals, all of which were denied.

 

 

 

The case became a cause célèbre for human rights advocates, who argued that executing a man while testable evidence sat in an evidence room was a risk the state should not take. They pointed to other Texas cases where DNA testing had exonerated death row inmates.

 

 

But Texas law requires that a defendant show that DNA testing would prove innocence by a preponderance of the evidence. Cardenas’s lawyers argued that the test could have settled the case, but courts ruled that his confession and the location of the body were sufficient to uphold the conviction.

 

 

On the night of the execution, Cardenas’s family gathered outside the Huntsville Unit. They had maintained his innocence for two decades. Myra’s family also waited, carrying two decades of grief into what was supposed to be the final chapter.

 

 

 

When the warden asked Cardenas if he had a final statement to give aloud, he did not speak. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, no oral statement was recorded. His written statement was released afterward.

 

 

 

In that statement, he thanked his family for believing in him and his attorneys for their hard work. He also thanked the Mexican consulate and government officials who tried to help him. He named two friends, Marisella Luna and Julia Thim, as “good friends now.”

 

 

 

He did not apologize to Myra’s family. Instead, he said he would not apologize for someone else’s crime and that he would “be back for justice.” The statement ended with “Thank you with respect.

Reuben Cardenas.”

 

 

The execution drew international attention. The Mexican government had been involved since learning of Cardenas’s arrest five months after it happened. The Vienna Convention violation was a central issue in the case, but it did not stop the execution.

 

 

 

The International Court of Justice’s ruling in the Avena case had ordered judicial review for Cardenas and 50 other Mexican nationals. But the U. S.

Supreme Court’s decision in Medellín v. Texas in 2008 held that the ICJ ruling was not automatically enforceable against state courts.

 

 

Congress never pᴀssed legislation to implement the Avena ruling. As a result, Texas was free to proceed with the execution despite the international court’s order. Mexico called this a serious breach of international law, but it had no power to stop the state.

 

 

 

Human rights lawyer Gregory Kuykendall, representing Mexico’s interests, told reporters that what separated a functioning justice system from disorder was exactly the kind of due process Cardenas had been denied. He argued that the execution was illegal under international law.

 

 

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had granted precautionary measures asking the United States to halt the execution until Cardenas’s international peтιтion could be fully considered. The U. S.

government did not act on the request.

 

 

By the time the Supreme Court denied the final appeals, Cardenas had been waiting in his cell for four hours past the original execution time. The death chamber was ready, and the media was gathered outside. The family of Myra Lagona was present.

 

 

 

Myra Lagona was 15 years old when she disappeared. She lived with her family in a public housing complex in McAllen, Texas, in the Rio Grande 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. On February 22, 1997, an ordinary Saturday night in South Texas, Myra went to bed the way she always did. Sometime before dawn, Roxanna woke to find someone in the room.

 

 

 

She saw her sister’s mouth taped shut, her hands bound, and a man moving her toward the window. Roxanna was a child watching another child being taken with no way to stop it. Outside, a woman reported seeing a man walking with a barefoot teenage girl dressed only in a shirt and underwear.

 

 

 

Myra’s parents reported her missing that same morning. The investigation began immediately, and police started close to home. Reuben Cardenas was Myra’s first cousin.

He had grown up around her family and had spent time with her at gatherings. He was not someone the family would have thought to fear.

 

 

Police brought him in voluntarily on the morning Myra was reported missing. He stayed at the police station for more than 10 hours, questioned by nine different law enforcement officers. He was released without being charged that evening.

 

 

 

The break in the case came from Tony Castillo, who admitted to investigators that he and Cardenas had been involved in taking Myra. Once Castillo implicated his friend, police arrested Cardenas on February 23, 1997, one day after Myra’s disappearance.

 

 

Cardenas gave police a statement describing the night in detail. He said he had been high on cocaine, that he and Castillo drove to Myra’s apartment and took her from her bedroom, that he had 𝒔𝒆𝒙 with her, and that when he untied her, she attacked him, and he lost his temper and beat 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, and her body was found there.

 

 

 

For investigators, 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 two days, the case had gone from a missing teenager to a full arrest with a signed statement and a recovered body.

 

 

 

But the statement that seemed to close the case in February 1997 would become the most contested piece of evidence in a legal fight that lasted almost 20 years. Cardenas’s lawyers argued that the confession was coerced and that the physical evidence did not support the state’s theory.

 

 

They pointed to the 11 days before Cardenas was appointed counsel, during which he remained subject to police questioning and gave a series of statements that were inconsistent with each other and with the physical evidence. They argued that the case bore all the indicia of a wrongful conviction.

 

In a 1997 interview with a local television station, Cardenas offered a version that diverged sharply from both his police statement and the state’s theory. He said Myra had asked him to help her 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 her own kidnapping so she could get away from home. He said they argued outside of town, and 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. None of these accounts matched cleanly.

In one version, Myra asked to be taken away. In another, he described Sєxual contact and a fight that turned ᴅᴇᴀᴅly. In his final years, he abandoned both versions and said outright that he had not killed her at all.

 

 

 

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. They also pointed to the broader pattern in cases involving young Spanish-speaking suspects questioned for extended periods without counsel.

 

 

 

But prosecutors treated the fact that Cardenas led detectives to the canal as the strongest evidence in the entire case. They argued that only the person responsible could have known where to find the body. Strip away the confession, they said, and ask what else tied Cardenas to Myra’s death.

 

 

 

There was Roxanna’s account, though she did not identify the intruder by name in her earliest statements. There was the housing complex witness. There was Tony Castillo’s admission.

There was hair and forensic evidence collected at the time. And there was the location of the body.

 

 

The defense argued that there was no physical evidence directly linking Cardenas to the crime scene beyond his own statement. They said there was no forensic evidence confirming a Sєxual ᴀssault. And they argued that the eyewitnesses closest to the abduction either failed to identify him or described 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. 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 тιԍнтly as it first appeared. They noted that Roxanna, the witness with the closest possible view of what happened that night, never identified Cardenas by name in her earliest statements.

 

 

They argued that the housing complex witness’s description of the man she saw did not clearly match Cardenas either. And they returned again and again to the absence of forensic confirmation of a Sєxual ᴀssault in a case where the Sєxual ᴀssault 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.

 

 

The jury did not agree with the defense. In February 1998, they convicted Cardenas of capital murder. During the punishment phase, they answered Texas’s special sentencing questions in a way that required the judge to impose a death sentence.

 

 

 

Tony Castillo faced a different outcome. He was convicted of aggravated kidnapping and sentenced to 25 years in prison. 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 Cardenas’s lawyers would spend the next two decades trying to unravel.

 

 

 

On July 29, 1998, Reuben Ramirez Cardenas 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 habeas litigation.

 

 

 

Cardenas 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 Cardenas.

 

 

 

He was not told he could seek help from Mexican officials, and the Mexican consulate was not notified of his arrest. It would take five 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 ᴀssistance Program, Cardenas 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 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 v. United States, finding that the US had violated its consular notification obligations toward these citizens, Cardenas included.

 

 

The court ruled that the United States had breached Article 36 of the Vienna Convention by failing to inform Cardenas 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.

 

 

That ruling should have mattered. In practice, it collided with the American legal system’s own rules about how international law applies domestically. In 2008, in a related case involving another Mexican national named José Ernesto Medellín, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the ICJ’s decision was not automatically enforceable against individual states unless Congress pᴀssed legislation making it so.

 

 

 

Congress never did. The practical effect of Medellín v. 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.

 

 

 

Cardenas 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, Cardenas had lost in the Texas courts, lost in the federal courts, and lost in the political arena. One avenue remained: 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 were routine in police labs by 2017. They 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. But Hidalgo County prosecutors saw the request differently. They argued the DNA peтιтion was a delay tactic intended to muddy the waters rather than uncover the truth.

 

 

 

They pointed to the fact that Cardenas 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 25, 2017, a Hidalgo County judge denied the motion for DNA testing.

 

 

Cardenas’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 last-minute 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. Cardenas’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.

 

 

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, Cardenas’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. The execution was scheduled for 6:00 p.

m. on November 8, 2017, at the Huntsville Walls Unit.

 

 

That morning and into the afternoon, the case reached its widest audience yet. Two days earlier, in a press conference in Mexico City, Carlos Sada, Mexico’s deputy foreign minister for North America, had called the looming execution an illegal act, rooted in a failure that stretched back to the very start of the case.

 

 

The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had already granted precautionary measures, a formal request that the United States hold off on the execution until Cardenas’s international peтιтion could be fully considered. Human rights lawyer Gregory Kuykendall told reporters that what separated a functioning justice system from disorder was exactly the kind of due process he argued Cardenas had been denied.

 

 

None of it stopped the clock. 6:00 pᴀssed with Cardenas 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 pᴀssing the case to the next.

 

 

The case moved to the United States Supreme Court. For nearly four 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. Myra’s family carried 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. Cardenas was taken into the execution chamber.

He was strapped to the gurney. The warden asked if he had a final statement to give aloud. The lethal dose of pentobarbital began.

 

 

 

Cardenas, eyes closed, took a couple of breaths, mumbled briefly, and began snoring. Within less than a minute, all movement stopped. At 10:26 p.

m. Central Time, Reuben Ramirez Cardenas was pronounced ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. He was 47 years old, the seventh person executed in Texas that year.

 

 

 

When the warden asked Cardenas 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 Cardenas 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 Cardenas.

 

 

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 Myra’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 Cardenas was not sentenced to death on DNA evidence. He was convicted on the strength of his own statement to police, the discovery of Myra’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 appellate 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 8, 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 McAllen, 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 insтιтutions 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.