Death Row Stories

Two construction workers are brutally attacked in San Antonio, but one survives and is able to identify his assailant. Ruben Cantu, who was only 17 at the time of the attack, was executed for the crime in 1993, despite serious doubts about his guilt. As detectives investigate, they determine Cantu's conviction was based on questionable evidence. Did they execute the right man?

In 1983, An entire family is brutally murdered in their home in the Chino Hills area of California, with their eight-year-old son being the only survivor. An escaped convict named Kevin Cooper was convicted and sentenced to death, based on evidence including a getaway car, a hatchet, and a bloodstained shirt. But did Cooper really kill the Ryen family - or was he framed?

In 1994, the execution-style killings of a Florida nightclub owner and two aspiring models are caught on camera, and this evidence makes the case seem very clear-cut. Pablo Ibar and Seth Peñalver are convicted of the triple murder, but subsequent retrials reveal a cover-up and a surprising amount of evidence not disclosed by the prosecution. Was the wrong man sent to death row?

In 1987, Randy Steidl was sentenced to death for the double murder of a pair of newlyweds in the town of Paris, Illinois. They were stabbed to death, and a fire was set in an attempt to cover the crime. Steidl spent more than a decade trying to prove his innocence, fighting against flawed evidence, conflicting accounts, and recantations. Will he finally be exonerated and released?

Darlie Routier, was sent to death row in 1996 for allegedly murdering two of her young boys in their Dallas-area home. With a closer look, her conviction is much less clear: the original investigation was handled improperly, the jury may have been biased by incomplete evidence, and Routier herself was badly hurt in the incident. Is she really innocent, as she has always claimed?

Throughout the history of capital punishment in America, states have revised execution methods in the interest of finding a more "humane" option. Ohio, Arizona, and Oklahoma are among the states where lethal injection executions have gone horribly wrong. What's life like for those executioners who are paid to end the lives of others, especially when it doesn't go according to plan?