The state of Texas has issued a death warrant seeking to execute Melissa Lucio (pictured), a battered woman who was sentenced to death for what may have…
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted Lucio a new trial, finding that the trial court’s exclusion of testimony from the two experts had violated…
This is how
The State of Texas vs. Melissa begins. Newly released on Amazon and other streaming platforms, the unsettling documentary by French director Sabrina Van Tassel raises questions about the conviction of Melissa Lucio, the first Hispanic woman on death row in Texas. Lucio was found guilty of abusing and killing her two-year-old daughter, Mariah, in 2007.
The state argued that Lucio confessed to a pattern of abusing Mariah and to inflicting fatal blows to the child’s head. Lucio maintains that she’s innocent, asserting that the confession law enforcement elicited from her in the film’s opening scene she admitted to causing many of the child’s injuries, but not to killing her was coerced after a five-hour interrogation the night her child died.