Texas court grants stay of execution for death row inmate Melissa Lucio

CNN has reached out to prosecutors for remark.

Lucio will stay on demise row regardless of the keep, in line with her authorized crew.

The courtroom’s ruling delays Lucio’s execution whereas the trial courtroom considers the deserves of her claims.

In response to Lucio’s attorneys, the trial courtroom in Brownsville will maintain proceedings to listen to the proof of Lucio’s innocence. The courtroom would then make a advice to the Texas Courtroom of Prison Appeals, which is able to finally resolve whether or not Lucio ought to obtain a brand new trial, Tivon Schardl, one in every of Lucio’s attorneys, stated at a digital information convention Monday.

“There’s nonetheless an extended strategy to go in Melissa’s case, and there is rather more that stands in the way in which of Melissa and an exoneration,” stated Vanessa Potkin, the director of particular litigation on the Innocence Mission, whose attorneys are additionally engaged on Lucio’s case.

“However right this moment’s keep and remand to have hearings on new proof of her innocence actually opens the door to the potential of a brand new trial in her case,” Potkin instructed reporters, “and finally, full vindication.”

Lucio’s household appeared on the press briefing, thanking her authorized crew.

Causes for doubt ‘are innumerable’

When she died, Mariah’s physique was coated in bruises “in varied phases of therapeutic,” her arm had been damaged a number of weeks earlier and he or she had a chunk mark on her again, per courtroom paperwork.

In response to the state’s case, these accidents had been the results of abuse. At trial, the medical expert testified for the state Mariah died of blunt-force trauma to the top, calling her a “battered baby.” An ER physician who tried to resuscitate Mariah known as it the “absolute worst” case of kid abuse he had seen.

However Lucio — a mom of 14 — and her attorneys insist she is harmless and that Mariah’s accidents had been sustained in a fall down a steep staircase outdoors the household’s residence. And authorities, suffering from a misunderstanding in regards to the fall, ignored or discounted proof that may have confirmed her innocence, Lucio’s attorneys say.

Lucio by no means abused her youngsters, they are saying, pointing to greater than a thousand pages of Little one Protecting Providers information from that point.

These information, per her clemency petition, “inform a narrative of Melissa’s love for the kids, in addition to her incapacity to look after them correctly,” pointing partly to the household’s battle with poverty and Lucio’s drug dependancy. However not one of the CPS information, her attorneys say, point out any of the kids ever reported being abused by Lucio.

Lucio was convicted largely, her attorneys argued, on the premise of a coerced “confession” she gave authorities in an “aggressive” late night time interrogation the identical night time her daughter died. However Lucio’s attorneys stated she solely “vaguely” indicated she was answerable for her daughter’s accidents and by no means confessed to being answerable for Mariah’s demise.

Lucio was notably inclined to coercion resulting from her standing as a lifelong survivor of sexual abuse and home violence, her attorneys stated, citing medical consultants who reviewed the case.

Lucio’s authorized crew has supplied different explanations for Mariah’s accidents, once more citing medical consultants: Her bruises might have been attributable to her fall and a blood coagulation dysfunction, they are saying, and a fractured arm just isn’t unusual in toddlers, notably one like Mariah, who had a documented historical past of falling.

“The explanations for doubt listed below are innumerable,” her attorneys wrote in Lucio’s clemency petition. “The prospect that the State may shed harmless blood for a demise Melissa Lucio didn’t trigger, a lot much less intend, ought to strike righteous fury within the coronary heart of Texans.”