Sen. Ted Cruz is of course a hardline supporter of the death penalty, because that is the hard-right conservative thing to be. That he maintains that steadfast conviction even though he himself once worked on a case in which a innocent man had spent 14 years on death row after prosecutors hid blood tests and other evidence exonerating him
somehow makes that worse.
As an attorney for this man, Cruz argued that local prosecutors could not be trusted, that institutional failures in the justice system had nearly led to his client's execution, and that this fellow was owed $14 million in restitution because of these miscarriages of justice. But after his experience in this dramatic case—which included coauthoring a passionate brief presented to the Supreme Court—Cruz the politician would still offer a full-throated endorsement of the criminal-justice system and capital punishment.
Connick v. Thompson would be one of this Supreme Court's more infamous decisions, as it turned out, with Clarence Thomas himself authoring the resulting opinion tsking that mistakes were made but you couldn't blame the district attorney's office for having a few bad apples that nearly resulted in an innocent man's execution and so on. Cruz helped craft the plaintiff's argument, a litany of all the things prosecutors had done to Thompson in order to put him on death row and keep him there.
"Over a four-month period between Thompson's arrest and his separate convictions for capital murder and armed robbery, at least four prosecutors in Connick's office…failed to produce more than a dozen pieces of favorable evidence, including a crime-laboratory report, police reports, witness statements, audiotapes, and other materials."
So Cruz has had at least one case that has presented him squarely with evidence that innocent people can and do end up facing the death penalty, in this case because ambitious prosecutors simply hide evidence they don't want the defense to see, but he still has "confidence" in it, whatever that means.
I suppose it means what we all think it means—that Cruz finds the death penalty to be compelling enough that he, like most other proponents, is willing to accept the occasional execution of an innocent defendant if it lets the rest of the system click along smoothly. Capital punishment is very important to the base. I don't know why, and don't want to.