Melissa Lucio was two days away from being put to death in Texas for the murder of her 2-year-old daughter when an appeals court intervened in 2022.
Now, a judge says Lucio never committed the crime at all.
“Applicant is actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter,” state district Judge Arturo C. Nelson wrote in an October filing released to the public Thursday.
It is now up to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which had asked the judge to revisit the case, to determine whether Lucio should be released.
“After 16 years on death row, it’s time for the nightmare to end. Melissa should be home right now with her children and grandchildren,” Vanessa Potkin with the Innocence Project, one of Lucio’s attorneys, said Thursday.
The case highlights an inherent risk of capital punishment: putting an innocent person to death. At least 200 people sentenced to die since 1973 were later exonerated, including 18 in Texas, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Lucio is one of seven women on death row in Texas, which includes 174 condemned inmates in all.
No execution date has been set for Lucio since the Criminal Court of Appeals ordered Nelson to review the case. No further hearings were scheduled in the case as of Friday, and it was not clear when the appellate judges might consider Nelson’s ruling.
“There’s no time frame within which the (Criminal Court of Appeals) has to decide a case that is submitted to them,” Potkin told CNN on Friday.
Lucio’s family hopes a decision comes quickly.
“This is the best news we could get going into the holidays,” said Lucio’s sons, John Lucio and Bobby Alvarez, and a daughter-in-law in a statement released by their attorneys. “We pray our mother will be home soon.”
Judge cites critical errors in murder trial
After an hourslong interrogation in which she first “insisted she was innocent,” Lucio ultimately said she was “‘responsible’ for what happened” to her daughter in 2007 but never made an “express admission to causing her daughter’s death,” Nelson’s ruling states. Lucio’s defense has maintained she never actually confessed to causing the death of 2-year-old Mariah Alvarez.
Nelson recommended earlier this year Lucio’s conviction be overturned because the state withheld evidence showing Mariah may have died from an accidental fall down the stairs rather than because of physical abuse by her mother. Lucio’s attorneys and the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office more than a year earlier submitted a court filing including an acknowledgment the state withheld evidence favorable to Lucio, with both sides agreeing she was entitled to relief.
The new findings of fact go even further.
“This Court concludes there is clear and convincing evidence that no rational juror could convict Applicant of capital murder or any lesser included offense,” Nelson wrote in his ruling released this week.
Lucio’s trial jury also was improperly influenced by a prosecution witness’ claim he could determine Lucio’s credibility based on her “demeanor” during testimony, Nelson found, a claim the court ruled has since been scientifically debunked.
The jury also should have been informed Lucio was a victim of “physical and sexual abuse,” which “increase a person’s risk of a false confession,” the judge found.