[imagesource: Courtesy of the Lucio family]

The only Hispanic woman on Texas’ death row has likely been wrongfully accused, coerced, and manipulated by authorities into falsely admitting that she killed her two-year-old daughter in 2007.

Family and advocates of Melissa Lucio are fighting to stop her looming execution, pleading with Texas Governor Greg Abbott and the state’s board of pardons to intervene before the state makes an irreversible decision.

Inexcusable legal missteps behind Lucio’s death sentence have come to the fore, laid out in a 266-page petition calling for the postponement of the execution and a new trial, reported The Guardian.

Kim Kardashian is also putting her weight behind the case, among other celebs, religious bodies, women’s and domestic violence advocacy groups, and five of the jurors who convicted Lucio originally.

All are calling for a reprieve.

Image: The Guardian

The 52-year-old is the mother to nine children (including Mariah, who died), all of whom have explicitly stated throughout that their mother has and never would lay a finger on them:

Next Wednesday (April 27), pending a last-minute stay, Lucio, 52, will be executed for a crime that significant evidence suggests she did not commit.

Not only that, but significant evidence also suggests that the crime for which she will be strapped onto a gurney and injected with lethal drugs never happened in the first place.

Growing evidence can prove that Lucio did not beat her child to death, but was forced into a false admittance after being subjected to a brutal police interrogation (via the terribly problematic Reid method) two hours after her child died.

At the time she was pregnant with twins, having endured a sordid past of sexual and domestic abuse.

Lucio was busy getting her children ready for school when she found Mariah at the bottom of the stairs (which her other children confirmed):

Over the next 48 hours family witnesses said that Mariah showed signs of distress, including sleeping long hours and being listless. None of that evidence, which could support the diagnosis of an internal brain injury caused by the fall, was presented at trial.

…Two days after falling down the stairs, Mariah stopped breathing and became unresponsive. Lucio dialed 911; paramedics tried to revive the child but she died before reaching the hospital.

Many of the flaws in the prosecution stem from the fact that the 911 first responders had found her slouched on the floor instead of depicting what they thought a grieving mother should look like:

Lucio had been brought up in an extremely poor and troubled family in Lubbock, Texas, in which she had been subjected to sexual assault from the age of six and at 16 had become a child bride in a bid to escape the abuse.

Long years of domestic violence ensued. Her cumulative experiences – never told to the jury – made her singularly vulnerable to making a false confession in the course of a coercive interrogation.

Lucio’s past also explains her initial lack of emotion and detachment from the death of her child: when trauma is too big to process, an already traumatised person will rather dissociate than confront the situation.

The testimony that Lucio was hiding something based on this is false:

Several scientific studies have shown that you cannot deduce anything about a suspect’s guilt or innocence from their body language or facial mannerisms.

Additionally, the medical examiner who carried out the autopsy on Mariah provided a few misleading and false pieces of evidence that further pushed Lucio into being wrongfully accused.

The Innocent Project outlines all the crucial factors that have caused this devastating mess for Lucio, including that she has continually maintained her innocence for over 14 years, that there was no evidence to suggest she did beat her children, and that the jury did not even hear her defence and are thus asking for a retrial.

Basically, Lucio’s case has all the indications of a wrongful conviction built upon a false confession.

[source:guardian]