- A Texas court has stayed the execution of a Texas mother convicted of killing her daughter.
- Melissa Lucio's defense team argued that she was coerced into making a false confession.
- Data suggests that nearly 70% of women exonerees were convicted of crimes that didn't occur.
The execution of Melissa Lucio, who was sentenced to death in 2008 for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, is now on hold, a Texas court determined Monday.
Lucio, 53, was scheduled to die by lethal injection Wednesday. But a state court of criminal appeals stayed her execution after months of legal challenges and a vocal bipartisan list of supporters who claimed she was pressured into giving a false confession.
"I thank God for my life," Lucio, a mother of 14, said in a statement Monday. "I have always trusted in Him. I am grateful the Court has given me the chance to live and prove my innocence."
The order calls for a merits review of her case through a lower court, though a trial date has not been set. One of Lucio's attorneys recently told The Independent that if the stay was granted, her team would be pursuing an evidentiary hearing — with an independent prosecutor — where they would also ask for a new trial.
Lucio's defense team says crucial evidence — such as details of the interrogation and expert medical testimony — was withheld or misrepresented when a jury found her guilty in her daughter Mariah's death.
The Cameron County District Attorney's Office did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
"I welcome the opportunity to prosecute this case in the courtroom: where witnesses testify under oath, where witnesses may be cross-examined, where evidence is governed by the rules of evidence and criminal procedure ... That is our criminal jurisprudence system, and it is working," District Attorney Luis Saenz, who was not elected until after Lucio was already convicted, told the Associated Press.
In July 2008, Lucio was charged with capital murder in the death of her daughter. Prosecutors argued that Mariah was the victim of abuse, as evidenced by bruises on her body.
Her defense team said that on February 15, 2007, Mariah fell down a staircase as her family was moving into a new home. She died two days later in her sleep on her parents' bed.
Mariah's autopsy revealed that her cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.
Police began their interrogation of Lucio two hours after Mariah's death and Cameron County prosecutors argued at her trial Lucio had "intentionally and knowingly" caused Mariah's death, according to court documents. They relied heavily on her confession during her trial.
Lucio has maintained her innocence for 15 years and her attorneys have maintained that the confession was coerced, saying that Lucio's challenging upbringing and abusive relationships may offer insight into the confession she gave.
Attorneys for 53-year-old Lucio, a survivor of abuse and sexual violence, argued that her past made her vulnerable to aggressive interrogation tactics. Pregnant with twins at the time, she underwent five hours of questioning the day Mariah died — in which interrogators frequently cut her off, showed her pictures of her dead daughter, and asked her to demonstrate what she did to her daughter on a baby doll they handed her, according to her attorneys and footage of her interrogation.
At the end of the intensive interrogation, in which Lucio denied killing her daughter approximately 100 times, she said what prosecutors called a confession: "I guess I did it. I'm responsible."
Based on the tape of Lucio's interrogation and new evidence suggesting her daughter's death was accidental, supporters and experts have argued that her confession may have been false and that she should be considered for clemency.
Lucio's defense team submitted their petition of clemency on March 22 pointing to evidence that the 2-year-old's death was an accident.
Her then-husband and father of Mariah — who had a past of participating in assaultive behavior — was sentenced to four years for child endangerment in connection to Mariah's death.
Vanessa Potkin, an attorney on Lucio's legal team with the Innocence Project, a criminal justice organization focused on exonerating the wrongly convicted, told Insider that as a survivor of abuse Lucio "learned to be detached, to acquiesce, to not challenge" as a defense mechanism. Lucio had been sexually abused by a family member beginning at age 6 — later enduring two abusive marriages, according to details provided by the Innocence Project.
Professor Sandra Babcock, Director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and an attorney on Lucio's team, said that her behavior is what led the interrogators to target her, "because she did not fit their image of how a grieving mother should behave."
"They used interrogation tactics that replicated the dynamics of domestic violence, that told her she had no choice but to acquiesce to their insistence that she take responsibility for Mariah's injuries," Babcock said, according to the Innocence Project.
Women are likely to confess to crimes they didn't commit
Criminal justice advocates say Lucio's confession has some similarities to the case of Melissa Calusinski, a daycare worker who claimed she made a false murder confession for the 2009 death of 16-month-old Benjamin Kingan following a nine-hour interrogation. Evidence suggested Kingan's death was an accident. Calunski has since said she was coerced into confessing — however, she remains in prison.
Research suggests "women are indeed subject to a variety of pressures ranging from coercion and threats to family responsibilities which make them more compliant to the suggestions of police and prosecutors," according to a 2011 article published in the journal Criminology & Criminal Justice.
Data from the National Registry of Exonerations, which accounts for 3,062 exonerated individuals, estimates that nearly 70% of women who were exonerated had been convicted of crimes that didn't occur.
According to the registry, there are 264 female exonerees: 30 of them involved false confessions, 135 involved perjury or false accusations, and 93 involved false or misleading forensic evidence.
Melissa Lucio is still fighting to get off death row
Lucio, whose case is documented in a Hulu documentary called "The State of Texas vs. Melissa," has gained bipartisan support from Texas lawmakers who visited her in early April. Kim Kardashian, the reality TV star and criminal injustice advocate, and five jurors from Lucio's trial joined the chorus of support around staying her execution.
On Monday, the order from the Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas granting her stay of execution stated that her case should be reviewed for several reasons. Claims that the 138th Judicial District Court of Cameron County will consider include a false testimony without which a jury may not have convicted her, the scientific evidence that wasn't available at the time of her conviction, additional material evidence, and her possible innocence.
"Unfortunately, when it comes to wrongful convictions, I just don't think that Texas is a standout," Potkin told Insider. "This is a problem that impacts every city, every state throughout the United States, every county. It is pervasive because the types of evidence that we use to identify, arrest, prosecute individuals is fallible."
"The truth is that once you're convicted, it's extraordinarily difficult to get back into court with new evidence of innocence and to get a wrongful conviction overturned," she added.