Melissa Lucio has maintained her innocence since she was convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter.
A Texas court has granted a stay of execution for Melissa Pikewho was convicted of murdering her two-year-old daughter, after new evidence emerged.
Lucio was to be executed by lethal injection on Wednesday and would have become the first Hispanic woman to be executed in Texas. However, the appeals court on Monday granted a request by Lucio’s lawyers to delay her execution so a lower court could review her claims that new evidence by her would exonerate her.
Prosecutors have argued that Lucio abused his daughter, Mariah, leading to her death in 2007. His lawyers have argued that the girl died from injuries she sustained when she fell down steep stairs.
“I am grateful that the court has given me the opportunity to live and prove my innocence,” Lucio said in a statement provided by the Innocence Project, whose attorneys are helping to defend her. “Mariah is in my heart today and always.”
The effort to stay the execution has garnered national attention and celebrity support, as well as a bipartisan coalition in the Texas legislature.
Lucio’s lawyers have focused on a confession they say was forced and unreliable, the result of relentless questioning and his long history of sexual, physical and emotional abuse.
They argue that Lucio was not allowed to present evidence questioning the validity of his confession.
Her attorneys also contend that false and unscientific evidence misled jurors into believing that Mariah’s injuries could have been caused only by abuse and not medical complications from a serious fall.
Since then, Lucio’s lawyers have presented new evidence from forensic experts arguing that the girl died of blunt force trauma to the head consistent with injuries she may have sustained falling down a flight of stairs two days before her death while the family moved.
“It would have shocked the public conscience for Melissa to be executed based on false and incomplete medical evidence for a crime that never happened,” said Vanessa Potkin, one of Lucio’s attorneys at the Innocence Project.
“All of the new evidence of his innocence has never before been considered by any court. The court stay allows us to continue fighting alongside Melissa to overturn her wrongful conviction.”
Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz, who was not in office when Lucio was tried, said he appreciated “the opportunity to prosecute this case in the courtroom: where witnesses testify under oath, where witnesses can be interrogated, where the evidence is governed by the rules of evidence and criminal procedure”.
At an earlier Texas House committee hearing, Saenz had said he disagreed with claims by Lucio’s attorneys that new evidence would lead to an exoneration.
In its three-page order, the appeals court requested that the Brownsville trial court that handled Lucio’s case review four claims made by her attorneys: whether prosecutors used false evidence to convict her; whether previously unavailable scientific evidence would have prevented her conviction; if she is really innocent; and whether prosecutors suppressed evidence that would have been favorable to her defense.
It was not immediately clear when that review would begin.
The stay of execution was announced minutes before the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles considered Lucio’s clemency request to commute his death sentence or grant him a 120-day reprieve. The parole board did not review his clemency petition due to the stay of execution.
If the case were to come before the board again in the future, Lucio’s attorneys would have to file a new petition.
Texas has far outpaced other US states in the number of people executed since 1976, with 574 people executed by state authorities in the years since.
Reference-www.aljazeera.com