The judge who presided over the trial of death row inmate Melissa Lucio has recommended her conviction and death sentence be overturned, according to newly unsealed court documents.
Judge Arturo Nelson found in October that there was “clear and convincing evidence” that Lucio’s 2-year-old daughter Mariah Alvarez died in 2007 after an accidental fall down a staircase and that prosecutors had relied on false testimony and unreliable scientific evidence to convince a jury of her guilt.
Lucio, 56, “is actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter,” he wrote.
Nelson’s recommendation goes to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which will make the final decision on whether to overturn Lucio’s conviction and death sentence.
Texas Department of Criminal Justice via AP
“This is the best news we could get going into the holidays,” John and Michelle Lucio, Lucio’s son and daughter-in-law, said in a statement, according to the Innocence Project. “We pray our mother will be home soon.”
Lucio “lived every parent’s nightmare when she lost her daughter after a tragic accident,” Vanessa Potkin, one of Lucio’s attorneys and the director of special litigation at the Innocence Project, said.
“It became a nightmare from which she couldn’t wake up when she was sent to death row for a crime that never happened. 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.”
Newsweek has contacted Melissa Lucio’s lawyer and the Innocence Project for comment.
Lucio had been set to be executed by lethal injection in April 2022 after being convicted of capital murder in 2008, but the appeals court granted a request for a stay so her claims that new evidence would exonerate her could be reviewed.
Her attorneys said her conviction was based on an unreliable and coerced confession after relentless questioning. Unscientific and false evidence misled jurors into believing Mariah’s injuries could only have been caused by physical abuse and not by medical complications from a severe fall, they said.
In April this year, Nelson approved an agreement between Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz’s office and Lucio’s attorneys that found suppressed evidence—including witness statements from Lucio’s children and a report by Child Protective Services—would have corroborated her defense that her daughter died of a head injury sustained in an accidental fall. He recommended that Lucio’s conviction and death sentence be overturned as a result.
The court in June asked Nelson to make recommendations on three other claims that Lucio had presented about false testimony used by prosecutors, previously unavailable scientific evidence and her actual innocence.
In October, the judge ruled that Lucio’s conviction and sentence should be overturned based on those three claims as well.
Lucio “is actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter,” Nelson wrote.
“The Court therefore concludes that [Lucio] has met her burden of proof… for actual innocence as no rational juror could have convicted [Lucio] of killing her daughter after hearing all of the evidence from her original trial alongside all of the new evidence she has presented.”