Lawyers hope new evidence can stop Texas woman’s execution
HOUSTON ( AP) — During hours of relentless questioning, Melissa Lucio more than 100 times had denied fatally beating her 2-year-old daughter.
But worn down from a lifetime of abuse and the grief of losing her daughter Mariah, her lawyers say, the Texas woman finally acquiesced to investigators. “I guess I did it,” Lucio responded when asked if she was responsible for some of Mariah’s injuries.
Her lawyers say that statement was wrongly interpreted by prosecutors as a murder confession — tainting the rest of the investigation into Mariah’s 2007 death, with evidence gathered only to prove that conclusion, and helping lead to her capital murder conviction. They contend Mariah died from injuries from a fall down the 14 steps of a steep staircase outside the family’s apartment in the South Texas city of Harlingen.
As her April 27 execution date nears, Lucio’s lawyers are hopeful that new evidence, along with growing public support — including from jurors who now doubt the conviction and from more than half the Texas House of Representatives — will persuade the state’s Board of Pardons and Paroles and Gov. Greg Abbott to grant an execution reprieve or commute her sentence.
“Mariah’s death was a tragedy not a murder. ... It would be an absolutely devastating message for this execution to go forward. It would send a message that innocence doesn’t matter,” said Vanessa Potkin, one of Lucio’s attorneys who is with the Innocence Project.
Lucio’s lawyers say jurors never heard forensic evidence that would have explained that Mariah’s various injuries were actually caused by a fall days earlier. They also say Lucio wasn’t allowed to present evidence questioning the validity of her confession.
The Texas Attorney General’s Office maintains evidence shows Mariah suffered the “absolute worst” case of child abuse her emergency room doctor had seen in 30 years.
“Lucio still advances no evidence that is reliable and supportive of her acquittal,” the office wrote in court documents last month.
The Cameron County District Attorney’s Office, which prosecuted Lucio, declined to comment.
Lucio, 53, would be the first Latina executed by Texas and the first woman since 2014. Only 17 women have been executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on the death penalty in 1976, most recently in January 2021.
In their clemency petition, Lucio’s lawyers say that while she had used drugs, leading her to temporarily lose custody of her children, she was a loving mother who worked to remain drug-free and provide for her family. Lucio has 14 children and was pregnant with the youngest two when Mariah died.
Lucio and her children struggled through poverty. At times, they were homeless and relied on food banks for meals, according to the petition. Child Protective Services was present in the family’s life, but there was never an accusation of abuse by any of her children, Potkin said.
Lucio had been sexually assaulted multiple times, starting at age 6, and had been physically and emotionally abused by two husbands. Her lawyers say this lifelong trauma made her susceptible to giving a false confession.
In the 2020 documentary “The State of Texas vs. Melissa,” Lucio said investigators kept pushing her to say she had hurt Mariah.
“I was not gonna admit to causing her death because I wasn’t responsible,” Lucio said.
Her lawyers say Lucio’s sentence was disproportionate to what her husband and Mariah’s father, Robert Alvarez, received. He got a four-year sentence for causing injury to a child by omission even though he also was responsible for Mariah’s care, Lucio’s lawyers argue.
In 2019, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Lucio’s conviction, ruling she was deprived of “her constitutional right to present a meaningful defense.” However, the full court in 2021 said the conviction had to be upheld for procedural reasons, “despite the difficult issue of the exclusion of testimony that might have cast doubt on the credibility of Lucio’s confession.”
Three jurors and one alternate in Lucio’s trial have signed affidavits expressing doubts about her conviction.