Injustice averted? A Texas appeals court has suspended the execution scheduled for Wednesday of Melissa Lucio. This American mother has been sentenced to death for the murder of her two-year-old daughter after a controversial trial. Another Texas court will have to consider “new evidence of his innocence”, says a press release. The facts go back ten years.
“I am grateful to the court for giving me the chance to live and prove my innocence” and “to have more days to be a mother to my children and a grandmother to my grandchildren”reacted Melissa Lucio in a press release.
“The stay granted by the court allows us to continue to fight alongside Melissa to have her wrongful conviction overturned”, says his lawyer Vanessa Potkin. In recent weeks, calls for clemency from personalities like Kim Kardashian had multiplied in favor of this mother of 14 children of Hispanic origin, the interest in her case even crossing the American borders.
None of Melissa’s children had accused her of being violent
In 2007, her 2-year-old daughter Mariah was found dead in her home, covered in bruises, days after falling down stairs. Melissa Lucio, with a life marked by both physical and sexual assault, drug addiction and precarious conditions, is immediately suspected of having hit her.
At her trial she was sentenced to death. But the handicaps of the girl, likely to explain her fall, had not been taken into account by the experts, according to her defense, which ensures that the bruises could have been caused by a blood circulation disorder. None of Melissa’s children had accused her of being violent.
Christiane Taubira, former French Minister of Justice and former presidential candidate of 2022, immediately welcomed the decision, monday on twitter : “The execution of Melissa Lucio in Texas will not take place. How to write it without drowning in tears. Of anguish and joy. A new trial. Justice.”
It is rare for women to be executed in the United States. Only 17 have been since 1976, when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Texas is the state that has executed the most prisoners, with 6 put to death.