Two days before the date scheduled for the execution of the American of Mexican origin Melissa Lucio, A Texas appeals court announced this Monday (04.25.2022) the suspension of the sentence and requested that a lower judicial instance review the case, something that could lead to a new trial after having spent 14 years in prison.
“The State has given us the opportunity to go back to court and present evidence of Melissa’s innocence that no court has been able to analyze,” Vanessa Potkin, a representative of the Innocence Project, one of the organizations that has provided legal assistance to Lucio, explained at a press conference shortly after the decision was made known. , accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter in 2007.
As a huge downpour of rain fell on Austin, the capital of Texas, John Lucio and Bobby Álvarez, two of Melissa’s children who have made greater efforts to promote the campaign in favor of their mother, received the good news in Gatesville, the small town in rural Texas where their mother is incarcerated.
Until there they had moved to spend as much time as possible together during what were going to be the last hours of their mother, who was going to receive the lethal injection this Wednesday.
Images released by Franco-American filmmaker Sabrina Van Tassel, one of Melissa’s biggest supporters and who produced a documentary about the long list of irregularities that plagued his case, They showed the relatives exultant and excited.
Family celebration
Lucio’s family and friends celebrated the decision with a relaxed dinner, which took place near the prison where she is still incarcerated. Among the attendees were her sons John and Bobby, along with filmmaker Van Tassel.
Sharing a table with them was the founder of the organization Death Penalty Action, Abraham Bonowitz, and John Lucio’s wife, Michelle Lucio, thanks to whom, according to what he told the Efe Van Tassel news agency, the fight for the rights of Melissa.
“She was the first one I came into contact with. The only one who initially paid me some attention,” said the person in charge of the documentary “The State of Texas vs. Melissa.”
In total, about thirty people, all dressed in a black T-shirt with the message “Free Melissa Lucio”, gathered at the Junction on Route 36 restaurant, where the relaxed atmosphere of the establishment, full of decorative elements with a Texas flavor, coincided with the mood of the guests.
It was not for less, since the joint work of all of them led, when there were just over 48 hours left for the execution, in a judicial decision that could lead to a new trial for Lucio, accused of killing his daughter of two years of a beating, although she has always claimed that the little girl, Mariah, fell down the steep access stairs of her residence at the time.
The family hopes, in fact, that another trial will not be held, but that the charges against Melissa will be dropped directly and that this mother of 14 children will be able to return home after 15 years of absence, after she was arrested in February 2007, hours after the girl’s death.
Melissa Lucio is the first Latina sentenced to death in Texas, and had the execution been carried out, she would have become the first woman to receive the death penalty in the state since 2014.
