Texas State Representative Jeff Leach (R-Allen) said that he will continue to fight to halt the upcoming execution of Melissa Lucio. However, he hopes that the Cameron County District Attorney will step in and pause the execution if no one else takes action.
According to ABC News, juror Johnny Galvan said he did not know that Lucio claimed that she was innocent more than one hundred times during a 5-hour interrogation, that her eventual confession was forced, or that she is an abuse survivor. If he had known these things at the trial, he said, he would not have voted for her execution.
The news comes following a meeting of the Criminal Justice Reform Committee in Austin on April 12, where it was revealed that five of the jurors who found Lucio guilty of murdering her 2-year-old daughter and sentenced her to death in 2008 now believe that they were wrong in light of information that they did not have at the time of the trial.
Current Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz joined the Criminal Justice Reform Committee hearing remotely and stated that he does not believe that the case is closed or that Lucio’s scheduled April 27 execution will occur.
He said he would withdraw Lucio’s death warrant before the execution date if the courts, the board of pardons and paroles, or the governor does not step in.
Melissa Lucio was convicted of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah Alvarez, in 2008. Paramedics were called to her home on February 17, 2007, and found Mariah unresponsive and covered in injuries that suggested she had been severely beaten. There were bruises in various states of healing all over her body, one of her arms had been broken 2 to 7 weeks before the call, and patches of her hair were missing where it had apparently been torn out by the roots. She was pronounced dead on the scene.
Despite the evidence of physical abuse, Lucio and her lawyer always maintained that Mariah’s fatal injuries resulted from an accidental fall down a flight of stairs in Lucio’s home.
As of now, Lucio’s fate is in limbo. The April 27 execution date is still set, although public opinion seems to be shifting in her favor. A petition from the Innocence Project to stop the execution currently has over 220,000 signatures, the organization reports.
DA Saenz remains hopeful that the execution will not take place. If the execution does happen as scheduled, Lucio would be the first Latina to be executed in Texas in the modern era of the death penalty and the first woman to be executed since 2014, the Texas Tribune reports.
Patches of hair torn out by the roots!!! That does not happen from a fall down stairs. Plus the previous broken arm and bruises in the healing stages. There is more to this story than is being told. She did it or she knows who did.