This week in 1998

“I want you to know that I did not kill your sister. If you want to know the truth, and you deserve to know the truth, hire your own investigators. That’s all I have to say.”

— Pedro Muniz, convicted of rape and murder, lethal injection, Texas.
Executed May 19, 1998

Muniz was twenty when he arrested for the 1976 rape and murder of nineteen-year-old Janis Carol Bickham, a Southwestern University student. He confessed but later said police had threatened him. Muniz spent twenty-one years on death row for the crime, and before his execution he gave the prison guards a prepared statement written half in English, half in Spanish. He told his friends, “Keep walking forward, because Chicanos like us do not have another alternative.”