Hours after Melissa Lucio’s 2-year-old daughter Mariah Alvarez fell asleep and never woke up from her nap in February 2007, an investigator with Child Protective Services interviewed some of her other children.
Had her mother ever hit them?
No, one daughter said, she only spanked them sometimes but never Mariah. Her 9-year-old and 12-year-old daughters agreed: she never hit any of them. So what explained the extensive bruising on her tiny body and the blunt force trauma that ultimately killed her? Bobby, Lucio’s 7-year-old son, offered another explanation: two days earlier, he saw his little sister fall down the rickety outdoor wooden stairs of the second-story Brownsville apartment they had just moved out of. Several of her other children mentioned the fall. Daniella, then 20, also told law enforcement that Mariah’s health had been declining in the two days since the fall. She was having trouble breathing and was sleeping more than usual. These troubling signs of a medical condition caused by a blood coagulation disorder could have supported the defense’s argument that Mariah’s death was accidental and not, as the prosecution argued, the result of severe abuse.
But the jury that sentenced Lucio to death in 2008 for capital murder never heard any of it. While the details of these interviews made it to the prosecution, the full story never made its way to Lucio’s defense team, a serious violation of due process.
Thanks to this revelation, there’s now a mounting effort to overturn her conviction and free Lucio after 17 years in prison for a crime her attorneys, the district attorney and even the district judge who first tried the case agree, she probably shouldn’t have been convicted of.
Lucio’s case has been in the spotlight since at least 2022 when a bipartisan effort among Texas legislators helped it get a serious second look. There were concerning missteps. The jury, for example, didn’t hear why, after nearly five hours of coercive interrogation from a Texas Ranger, Lucio would so adamantly maintain her innocence before finally relenting with a confession of sorts.
An expert was prepared to testify that, as a victim of abuse herself, Lucio’s seeming acquiescence to a dominating male figure was not a reflection of guilt. But the judge decided the expert could not testify. Instead, the jury heard Ranger Victor Escalon Jr., tell them that he knew she was guilty because of the way she avoided eye contact and slumped her shoulders. Years later, that same ranger would find himself fumbling to explain law enforcement’s slow response to the deadly school shooting in Uvalde. The district attorney, for his part, was later convicted of bribery and extortion.
The outcry as Lucio’s execution approached was loud enough to halt it just two days before it was scheduled. But Lucio remains on death row.
Now, there’s a chance she could win back her freedom.
In a 33-page filing submitted in January 2023, the current Cameron County district attorney and Lucio’s defense team presented their findings that exculpatory evidence was withheld not just from the jury but from Lucio’s own lawyers. Recently, the district court judge who first heard the case agreed, urging the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to overturn the murder conviction and death sentence.
Again, Lucio’s family must wait to see what the court decides.
“It’s been 17 years that we have been without her. We love her and miss her and can’t wait to hug her,” several of Lucio’s children wrote in a joint statement.
In 2022, we wrote that the question of Lucio’s innocence was harder to determine than the question of whether she received a fair trial. We were troubled, for example, that she did not seek medical care for her ailing child. For the same failure, Mariah’s father was sentenced to only four years in prison. It is even clearer now that had the jury been able to hear all the evidence, they likely would not have convicted Lucio of murder. It is, as University of Texas law professor Jordan Steiker told the Texas Tribune, “exceptionally rare” to have this level of agreement about prosecutorial misconduct.
Lucio’s case certainly is exceptional for the attention it’s received. We worry it’s not all that exceptional for the missteps that helped put it in the spotlight. The Court of Criminal Appeals, though, has the chance, once again, to stand for justice and due process and provide relief to a woman and her family who, for nearly two decades have had to mourn not just the loss of a precious child but their mother, too.
Houston Chronicle
