One hundred-ninety-seven individuals sentenced to die have been exonerated in the U.S. since 1973. Melissa Lucio, on Texas death row since 2008 for a crime no reasonable person ever believed she committed, could and should be the 198th.
Lucio, now 55, was arrested in 2007 for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Mariah, despite forensic and eyewitness evidence that her daughter died from a head injury she suffered in a fall down steep stairs. Lucio, who was pregnant with twins and already the mother of 12 children at the time of Mariah’s death, had no record of violence, and thousands of pages of reports by Child Protective Services had never indicated that she abused her children. But after she was subjected to a five-hour, late-night aggressive interrogation by armed male investigators that didn’t end until she broke down and told them what they wanted to hear, “I guess I did it. I’m responsible.” The district attorney (now serving a 13-year federal prison sentence for bribery and extortion) then prosecuted Lucio for capital murder.
But last Friday, the district judge who presided over Lucio’s death penalty trial recommended that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturn her conviction after the DA’s office acknowledged that it withheld evidence that could have indicated her innocence.
Lucio came within two days of being executed in 2022 when the TCCA halted the execution to give them time to examine the case further.