Summary
Judge Arturo C. Nelson, who oversaw Melissa Lucio’s 2008 murder trial, now believes she is “actually innocent” in the 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter Mariah.
Lucio’s execution was stayed in 2022 after evidence emerged suggesting Mariah’s death resulted from an accidental fall, not abuse.
Nelson ruled that prosecutors illegally suppressed evidence supporting Lucio’s innocence, violating her constitutional rights, and recommended overturning her conviction and death sentence.
The case is now before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, which will decide whether to adopt Nelson’s recommendation.
Execution of innocent people is (and always has been) the entirely predictable, inevitable, and probably unavoidable result of capital punishment. There is no getting around the fact that, as long as the state executes prisoners, innocent people will be executed and “the state”, i.e. taxpayers, will pay more for it than they ever would have imprisoning the convicted for life.
We should only executing people who have incontrovertible evidence against them or who freely admit to the crime and are of sound mind.
There will ALWAYS be mistakes, bias, and corruption. There is no such thing as incontrovertible evidence. And even if there was some fantastical magical way to know absolute truth, that is still a pretty poor justification for more murder.
This is Texas so I would not count on it being overturned.
And the prosecutors will be disbarred and charged, yes? It’s pathetic that the former DA isn’t even named. So the system is still protecting the actual criminals.
They should serve 16 years, at a minimum, but 25-30 is fine.
It’s Texas, they’ve just been waiting to do it on the right week so they have something to distract from their worse politics
Holy fuck, that poor woman… I bet she’d take life in prison if it brought her daughter back. That hurts me to the core.
$10 says most
death penaltystate-sanctioned murder proponents would’ve proposed before 2022 (or even just before this verdict) that she was a clear-cut example of why it’s necessary because what kind of monster would definitely 100% verifiably beat their child to death? Fucking repugnant.This seems to be a constant occurrence.
