Texas judge finds mother on death row innocent in daughter’s death

A Texas district judge declared that a mother on death row is innocent in the 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter, according to court documents filed in October but made public this past week.

The decision in the case now stands with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, which in 2022 halted a scheduled execution of the mother, Melissa Lucio, to gather more evidence. That included asking the district judge in the original trial, Arturo Nelson, to file an opinion. An execution date has not been rescheduled.

Lucio, 56, who lived in the border city of Harlingen, was sentenced to death in 2008 after her daughter, Mariah Alvarez, died as a result of what prosecutors said was the mother’s physical abuse. Lucio and her lawyers have long maintained her innocence, arguing that Mariah died from complications after accidentally falling down a flight of stairs. An autopsy said the cause of death was blunt force trauma to the head.

Nelson sided with Lucio in his recent findings, writing that she was “actually innocent; she did not kill her daughter.”

He added that, even regardless of that conclusion, Lucio had a right to have her conviction overturned because the state had used false testimony in her trial and withheld evidence that was favorable to her case. The judge also cited new scientific evidence that was unavailable during her trial.

It was unclear Saturday when the Court of Criminal Appeals would issue its ruling. Vanessa Potkin, one of Lucio’s lawyers and a special litigation director for the Innocence Project, said it could take a couple of months. Once that court rules, the case could be returned to trial court, at which point a prosecutor would decide if the case should be retried or the charges dismissed.

But Potkin said it was difficult to overstate the significance of Nelson’s filing. “With the trial judge recognizing that she was convicted based on faulty evidence, and that she’s actually innocent, it just makes us incredibly optimistic that justice is going to prevail in Melissa’s case,” she said.

Lucio’s son John and daughter-in-law Michelle said in a statement through their lawyers that this was the best news their family could have been given heading into the holiday season.

“We pray our mother will be home soon,” the couple said.

After new evidence and additional testimony emerged in the years after Lucio’s sentencing, the case has drawn widespread outrage, with dozens of Democratic and Republican state legislators calling for leniency.

Had her execution proceeded as scheduled, Lucio would have been the first Hispanic woman executed in Texas since the Civil War. She is one of seven women (of 174 inmates total) on death row in the state, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Evidence that has surfaced since the original trial includes eyewitnesses who have said not only that Mariah had fallen down the stairs but that they had seen her show physical side effects stemming from the incident before her death.

New medical evidence showed that Mariah had a blood disorder that would have explained bruising found on her body, her lawyers said. In the original trial, a medical examiner testified that the bruising could have come only from physical abuse.

In his findings, Nelson said this evidence would most likely have been favorable enough to either sway a jury in Lucio’s favor or have caused the prosecution to reconsider the charges against her.

In April, Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz acknowledged in a joint statement with Lucio’s attorneys that evidence had been withheld by a previous district attorney that would have benefited Lucio’s case. Saenz did not respond to a request for comment.

News of the judge’s findings comes in the same week that the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the state can move forward with the execution of Robert Roberson, who was convicted of killing his 2-year-old daughter in a case that relied on evidence of shaken baby syndrome.

Although shaken baby syndrome, now referred to as abusive head trauma, is still recognized as an official diagnosis by the American Academy of Pediatrics, medical professionals who support the diagnosis still contend that it cannot be determined by scans or internal conditions alone.

Roberson’s supporters have argued that his daughter, Nikki, died not from abuse but from viral pneumonia and the prescribed medications she was taking, which can suppress breathing.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.