Melissa Lucio grew up poor in South Texas, a victim of years of sexual abuse from multiple offenders in the home. At age sixteen, she married her first boyfriend to escape tying up her self worth and being a mother, so much so that she eventually had fourteen children. The final two were twins that Melissa delivered behind bars after having been accused of allegedly murdering the next youngest sibling, two year old Mariah, on February fifteenth, two thousand and seven.
Mariah's older siblings witnessed her take a tumble down the stairs. Lethargy and a lack of appetite were hoped to be symptoms of something less severe than head trauma, but when she became unresponsive on February seventeenth, they called the ms. Mariah passed away, and an aggressive interrogation ensued, resulting in an admission to an overarching sense of guilt that most any mother would feel. The usual bruising from rough play with her siblings was later used to support the state's
theory of a pattern of abuse. Melissa's conviction would also go a long way to shore up a tough on crime image for a corrupt district attorney embroiled in a bribery scandal during an election year, Defying logic and the scientific method, the state's forensic pathologists ruled out Maria's fall down the stairs as the cause of the failed head trauma. Further, the children who witnessed the accident and denied the pattern
of abuse were not called to testify. After trial, Melissa's defense attorney was immediately hired to the DA's office with a bump and pay. The DA got reelected, but was later prosecuted by the FBI, and Melissa is still on death row. This is Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. Welcome back to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. Today we're talking about the case of Melissa Lucio, an innocent woman on
death row in Texas. Today. To tell this incredible, harrowing and urgent story, we have with us Sabrina van Tassel. Sabrina is an acclaimed documentary filmmaker and investigative journalist who has made forty five films and I think maybe it was all a build up to this one. Sabrina, welcome Toronful Conviction. Thank you so much, and with her is a badass Texas attorney named Margaret Schmucker, and Margaret has
been a fierce advocate for Melissa as her habeas attorney. Margaret, welcome toronful conviction.
Thank you for having me.
And thank you both for being here. So over the past few years, Sabrina has visited Melissa Lucio on death row in Texas, where she's been stuck since two thousand and eight. And throughout this episode you're going to hear excerpts from those interviews. You can also see in here in Sabrina's film The State of Texas Versus Melissa. And during those interviews, Melissa really was very candid with you about her life, which was just beyond tragic from the very beginning.
So Melissa was born in Houston. Her father left the mom when she was three months old, and they moved to Harlingen, Texas, and the mother kept being, you know, with different boyfriends. They were all abusive.
I was.
Molested by my mother's boyfriend. I must have been about seven years old when the abuse started. I grew up not really loved because of this incident. I continued to be molested by other family members. I just allowed myself to be a victim over and over again.
She did tell her mother that the boyfriend was actually abusing her, and the mother basically did not believe her, and then she basically allowed herself to be a victim to other men in the family. And once she was about fifteen years old, the first boyfriend that she got involved with she married, and she started having a family right after. By the age of twenty two, she already
had five children. Her husband introduced her to drugs, and one day the husband just left her, and so all of a sudden, she's twenty two and she has five children, and she meets her other partner, Robert Alvarez, and together they're going to have nine other children, right.
And two of those nine were twins that Melissa delivered in jail while she was being held for the alleged murder of her youngest child at that time, Riah. So before Mariah died, there were five from the first guy and seven from Robert Alvarez, for a total of twelve. Some of them were still really little, some of them were teenagers. Some of them had even moved out by the time Febuary two thousand and seven year olds around,
which is when this incident happened. But before that they were all living in desperate, desperate poverty and relying on a charity called Loaves and Fishes for most of their meals. Melissa and robert had very unpredictable schedules because they were doing all sorts of odd jobs trying to support the family and to keep up with all of it, or
to I don't know, maybe forget their troubles. Melissa and Robert were using drugs out of the sight of the children, but regrettably also while she was pregnant with Mariah.
When Melissa had Mariah, the seventh child with Roberta Alvarez, she was born with drugs in her system, and so she was taken from Melissa or mister Albarez by CPS Child Protective Services, along with all of the other kids that were in the home at that time, and they were placed in foster care. They were fairly well split up.
That continued for so years, and Melissa and Roberta were given supervised visits with Child Protective Services with the kids, and then finally, when Mariah's about two years old, over Thanksgiving, CPS returned the seven children, who were still minors at the time, back into the home of Melissa and Roberta.
And so it is from that point until the point where Mariah dies, where there's nine children in the home in this small second story apartment with a rickety, scary stairwell on the exterior, which is the access point right.
And to make this accent even more likely to happen, Mariah had this is important, a physical impairment as well. One of her feet was turned in slightly, which caused her to be unstable and to fall downstairs occasionally, as was documented while she was in foster care. But that's not all that was documented in those Child Protective Services reports.
There was a tremendous amount of inter sibling violence while in foster care and when they were living at home, especially from the older sisters disciplining the younger ones who they resented having to care for while their parents were at work. And then the boys were very rambunctious as well.
Yeah, I mean the boys were fighting, you know, all the time, and you know, they were big on Wwe keep in mind, CPS comes by once in a while, and so we have the CPS reports, and on one of those, the very last time they came to visit,
which was two months prior to Mariah's death. There's concern that, you know, the place is too small, that they're you know, small objects on the floor, that those stairs are very dangerous, and the parents are not around, and basically it's up to the teenage daughters to supervise them.
So among the many problems, they've got to move out of this decrepit, totally unfit apartment with the rickety stairs, and they found a first floor apartment with just two or three steps leading up to the door, and that move was going to be happening over the course of February fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth of two thousand and seven.
And so Melissa and Roberto were in the process of trying to get the family moved, and so some of the kids were with their mom, some of the kids were with their dad. They're going back and forth in a pickup truck taking loads. Mariah, being at that point about two and a half years old, was in the second story apartment with her mom and at least one of the teenage daughters while they were trying to pack
things up. Several of the sort of younger age children about eight nine years old were downstairs playing in the backyard at some point, Melissa and the older daughter are in one of the bedrooms. They're packing up clothes, what have you, and one of the kids who's playing in the backyard came upstairs. He went into the apartment to get a drink of water, and there was a screen door on that exteriors or that had a latch on it, and when he went back downstairs to go play, he
left that door unlatched. And Mariah, who as we've already discussed, was unstable on her feet because of her small deformity, went to go follow her brother and she started down the stairs and fell. One of her brothers saw her as she sort of tumbled the last three or four steps and hit her head on the pavement. Melissa, at this point goes looking for her and finds Maria at the bottom of the stairwell, and she checks her over
and doesn't see any serious injury. Doesn't look like she's broken any bones or anything, and Mariah's not crying, she's not acting like she's hurt, and so she takes Mariah and they go back upstairs and they continue to pack
and complete the move to the new apartment. So by time Saturday rolls around, Mariah has already had this closed head injury from this fall down the stairs that is not noticeable from her head or scalp, and her progression of symptoms during that time period is exactly what you would expect for a child of that age who's had a serious close head injury and who has swelling on
the brain. It progresses from lethargy to not wanting to eat, to ultimately some more serious symptoms where she has lockjaw, and then she basically loses consciousness, although to her parents
she's still just sleeping. And at that point they're already in this first floor apartment and Roberto Alvarez goes out on air and he comes back and he goes to check on Mariah and she is non responsive, and so they do end up calling EMS, and EMS shows up at this apartment and they see injuries bruises on Mariah that they don't have any explanation for. And they hear Melissa say, well, she fell down the stairs a few days ago and we thought she was okay, but maybe
she wasn't. And the EMS sort of jumped to the conclusion that the stairs Melissa is talking about are the two or three steps from the ground floor apartment they are now in, and they have no knowledge of this full flight of stairs at the prior apartment that they were living in just a few days earlier, And so the EMS are incredulous, to say the least. They're, oh, you know, a kid can't get this injured falling down
two or three stairs. And so they try and resuscitate Mariah unsuccessfully, which can leave its own kinds of bruises on a body. But the MS take her to the hospital. She does pass away, and Melissa is arrested and taken to the police station.
So when she was pronounced dead Mariah, of course, I'm talking about in the er. She was examined initially by an er physician named Vargas, and he noted that she had sustained significant physical abuse. He said that she had several bruises that were in various stages of healing, and that there were bite marks on her back, and that one of her arms had been broken sometime two to seven weeks prior, and that she was missing portions of her hair. But Fargas said he found no outward sign
of head injury. So you can see how there's like a straight line connecting this to the interrogation. The interrogator was taking these findings from this doctor and then trying to put those words into Melissa's mouth.
I mean, you're not wrong. This information was all then conveyed to the police, and the police went in to the interrogation room with Melissa with already the preconceived notion that this had to have been physical abuse, and it had to have been physical abuse by Melissa in their view, because she was Mariah's primary caretaker, because she was the mother, and that's where her nightmare really sort of began as far as her involvement with the criminal justice system in
this case, because she is interrogated at length, well into the night and early wee hours of the morning by multiple police officers who are aggressively denying her explanation that Mariah had fallen down the stairs and her attempts to explain any older injuries that Mariah might have as having been the result of the rough play with her other older kids, which is well documented by CPS and by other just sort of slips and balls, because she has
a tendency to do that, and they just aggressively deny this, deny this, deny this. They won't believe her, and finally, in the wee hours of the morning, they get her to say that she's responsible. And they never get her to say really that she murdered Mariah, or that she
hit her on the head or anything. They just get her basically to admit responsibility in the sort of overarching way of a mother responsible for the circumstances that led to her child's death, and so she is charged with capital murder.
At that point, it's actually remarkable that she was able to not really confess. I mean, they called it a confession, but she didn't really confess. But eventually she was questioned by a Texas ranger named Escalon. She confessed basically having spanked Mariah several times, quote, day after day, and other minor abuses which we now know didn't happen, like biting her. So she was confessing to things that didn't even make
any sense at all because they weren't true. She was just basically trying to say, I guess anything she could to get out of this awful situation, and Target went so far as to ask Willista to demonstrate the spanking on a doll and was encouraged by the investigator to spank the doll harder, right, I mean, and this is on video, right, I mean the.
Way you actually did it just hard on her back.
We'll do it real hard, you will do it, but the way you would do it, that's.
The way we do it. I mean I wouldn't found on her. Mm hmm. It was it harder because I just I don't do it's hard. Well, you're doing it on yourself.
This is.
I mean, I wasn't pounding on her.
Yes, okay, and this is just what it was thanking.
My name is doctor John Pinkerman. I was the clinical psychologist appointed to Miss Melissa Lucio's defense team. Melissa had a history of certainly abuse, sexual abuse, and mistreatment going back into adolescence and can continuing throughout her adulthood in which she acquiesced to multiple individuals that abused her. She became pretty compliant with individuals, didn't tend to break free from them and often continue the relationships even though they
were really self defeating. For so, we felt this was you know, and I felt it was really a problem issue That helped explain some of the behavior that she evidenced during the interrogation and how she came to provide an acquiescence. I don't know if I want to call it a confession, but an acquiescence to the investigators in regard to her conduct. I was struck by how she was explaining that she was spanking the children, or spanking Melissa, and she it appeared like coach to show stronger force
in striking the table in the interview room. You know, all of that contradicted every piece of information we had that she provided physical discipline to the children. You know, we never heard that from any of the children, and certainly not to the extent of causing the alleged injury and subsequent death.
It's important to note that he didn't just encourage her to spank the dull harder. I mean, he encouraged you to confess to things which she had no knowledge of or had no part of. He told her there was a bite on Mariah's back and got her to confess to having bitten Mariah and at least my medical expert, so that wasn't even a bite mark. It was a parallel striation bruises from having fallen down the flight of
stairs on her shoulder blade. And so Ranger Escalon got Melissa to admit to a type of abuse of Mariah that did not exist, that had not happened at all. And again, that's sort of a hallmark of a false confession, is getting somebody to confess to something that there's no evidence of.
At the end of it. And this really is such a painful thing to think about. And I saw it, of course in the film. But you know, she ultimately says, I wish it was me that got hurt, and then started crying.
How do you feel when you see these pictures?
No, she was maybe not hurt.
Is there anything else you want to add?
Okay, she listen. It's three fifteen am, and that will end the interview.
This episode is underwritten by Paul Weiss Rifkin, Porton and Garrison, a leading international law firm. Paul Weiss has long had an unwavering commitment to providing impactful, pro bono legal assistance to the most vulnerable members of our society and in support of the public interest, including extensive work in the
criminal justice area. So during the interrogation, Escalon asked Melissa if they would find a fractured skull during the autopsy, even though the er physician said there was no sign
of head injury, but Escalon had a theory right. So on Monday February nineteenth, two thousand and seven, the chief forensic pathologist of Cameron and Hidalgo County is a woman named Norma je and Farley had conducted an autopsy and ruled that, due to the presence of bloodpooled in the crandial vault, that the cause of death was quote blunt force had trauma. And then she went on during the trial to say that a fall downstairs could not possibly
have been the cause. But that doesn't sound like science. That sounds like conjecture, right. Oh.
Absolutely.
My name is doctor Thomas Young. I am a forensic pathologist. Back in twenty ten, I was contacted by Margaret Schmucker, who served as an appellate attorney on the case of Texas versus Melissa Lucio. She wanted me to look at the records and offer opinions that I could make to a reasonable degree of medical certainty. Doctor Norma Jean Farley, who is also a forensic pathologist, has made a mistake
very common in forensic pathologists. The idea that you can look at an autopsy, that you can look at findings on a body and be able to determine the very very complex succession of events that happened in the past to lead to that event. This is reasoning backwards. It doesn't work. It is like trying to solve blank plus blank equals four. If you think four is the consequence of blank plus blank, looking at four doesn't give you
the answer to what goes in the blanks. There are already numerous witnesses as to what happened to see the succession of events that occurred that led to the outcome. What doctor Farley did was she reasoned backwards, ignoring all these witness accounts. She says that she knows for certain what happened here to Mariah Alvarez. And this is arrogant where you ignore what multiple witnesses say who were there to actually see what happened. This is absurd. This is
just a flat out guess. But doctor Farley approaches it as if she is certain about this.
How did she know that you cannot get a lot high trauma from a full down the stairs. I mean, it makes no sense.
You know, the science has developed at the time of Maria's death in since that it is possible for a child to fall down even a very sharp flight of stairs and have a fatal head injury. All I can say is Norma Farley was just wrong on the science on that. You know, you put an expert on the witness stand and the jury, you know, gives them an
awful lot of credence if they have appropriate credentials. And of course Norma Jean Farley was the medical examiner for the county, and so they give her testimony quite a bit of credibility clearly in reaching the verdict that they did.
That sure sounds like the science is being adjusted to fit the narrative when that is exactly the opposite of how this all should function. Right. Well, now we get to the trial, which the state argued that Melissa had confessed to a pattern of abuse and inflicting the fatal blows that killed Mariah. So the video clearly shows that that is not the case. So they supported the theory that Melissa was abusive with evidence that Mariah had bruises, which we know she did, that were at various stages
of healing. But we also have covered why they were there, and that had nothing to do with Melissa except the fact that she was not in control of her own life at that point, right, and Norma Jean Farley, again as a chief forensic pathologist, testified that Mariah's death was the result of blood force head trauma. She continued that it must have occurred within twenty four hours of death, and that it would have been immediately apparent that Mariah
was in distress and in need of medical attention. Now, Farley testified that Mariah suffered multiple contusions to her head area, but somehow she was magically able to rule out that the strikes to the head were not the result of tumbling down the stairs. Now, I don't think she witnessed the tumbling down the stairs. So again, how in the world would she know that, Well, she wouldn't, but this
is probably what she thought that the authorities wanted to hear. So, just so we're clear, Melissa's defense did put on the stand an expert named doctor Curry.
Correct, Yes, they did. But when they qualified doctor Curry as an expert, since he was a pediatric neurologist, he was not a forensic scientist, and so they did not allow him to testify it regarding the source of any of her other injuries anywhere below the neck. And so because the defense didn't hire a better expert or more appropriate expert. They were not able to counter the state's case that all of these prior injuries were from being
beaten repeatedly over a period of weeks or months. But he did contradict Norma Jean Farley's testimony in the timing of the head injury that caused her death. Norma Jean Farley had said that the injury had to have occurred approximately twenty four hours prior to her death. Doctor Curry, who was a pediatric neurologist, testified that it could have occurred earlier than that, you know, anywhere from forty eight
to seventy two hours before she died. And so that becomes important when you look at the timeline of events of the family moving and everybody being together, you know, either at the old place, the new place, or in transit about whether or not Melissa was ever alone with Mariah.
Melissa was never alone with Mariah.
Yeah, when you go back through all of the evidence that the state had collected, whether they used it or not at trial, you find that Melissa was never alone with the kids at all. Whether you look at the timeline suggested by doctor Farley or you look at the timeline suggested by doctor Curry, she was always with family members. They were always together as a family, either you know, a few kids or more everybody during that whole seventy
two hour period. And not one of those kids has ever said that during that time period that Melissa's ever hurt Mariah, ever touched her in any kind of aggressive way.
How could you possibly be alone in a two room or so apartment with nine kids, is It's preposterous.
So they did not present the evidence that she was never alone within that twenty four to seventy two hours prior to Mariah's death, and that the kids were never allowed to testify that they'd never seen their mom hit Mariah during that period of time, and she was never alone with Maria during that period of time. And then
there's the issue with doctor Pinkerman. The defense did try to put doctor Pinkerman on to talk about why my Melissa might have made this so called confession of being responsible, when in fact she was not, And the court refused to allow doctor Pinkerman to testify.
To that.
Of my colleague, Normal Villanueva was a social worker, and she and I developed different viewpoints about in the case. As we went along in our meetings with the defense team, we raised questions in our meetings, and I can remember at least on one occasion going to the second chair council just sort of asking, you know, is it possible that we could take a look at these issues and concerns.
That individual said that he thought it might be a good idea, but he deferred to the lead attorney, mister Gilman. I was not asked to provide any testimony during the Gilt innocence phase of the trial, but in the sentencing phase, I felt my testimony was abbreviated and truncated in a way because there was a lot of background information that I was prepared to offer to the court that would,
I hope, mitigate the ultimate sentence. It seemed that there was not much interest in having that information, as I understand, of course, the appeal was based on specifically on my opportunity or lack of opportunity to present that kind of viewpoint.
Melissa didn't have anybody on her behalf. Her kids weren't allowed to testify, nobody was allowed to testify.
She was alone in her defense because no one was really brought in to testify even though her trial attorneys knew that the older girls had admitted to causing Mariah's injuries, They knew that the younger kids had testified to seeing Mariah fall down the stairs, and they knew, or should have known, if they put sort of two and two together of all the various pieces of evidence that were available to them, that Melissa was never alone with Mariah at the time, But they never put any of that
evidence on.
With what the jury was presented with. The results were as predictable as they were tragic and wrong. She was convicted and sentenced to death.
When the jury came back and said that they found me guilty, even though I did hear the word guilty, I didn't want to step it. The best way to describe it is I felt like I was in a dream and then I would wake up and I would be at home with my kids.
You know.
Everybody was screaming and crying, and they let me out from the courtroom. They took me back to my cell and I remember I slept. I just tried to block out everything that had happened in that courtroom. I figured my children would be able to testify, that they would be able to get on that stand, and I know that they would come out and say the truth. And mister Gilman, he didn't want to. He told me no because he didn't know what the p secutors had in store for them, and he didn't want them to try
to manipulate them. And he felt that it wasn't there wasn't a need for my children to be understand.
You know, someone listening to this cold would probably come away with the impression that the defense attorney was almost
like an adjunct prosecutor. And as crazy as that sounds, it's not that crazy when you think about the fact that he went to work for the prosecutor immediately after the trial, and why would the prosecutor's office hire him at a higher salary than the season prosecutors that were already working there immediately after having watched him do as terrible of a job as an attorney can possibly do for their client. It's just stinks so bad.
It does stink.
But let me make some clarifying points about what really happened. Right before Mariah dies, there was another murder case in the Brownsville area and the defendant was a guy by the name of Amat Livingston and mister Livingston ends up I believe, pleading guilty to murder, but with the agreement of the District attorney's office Armanda Violobos, he is released in order to go put his affairs in order before he has to go to prison. When he's released, he
disappears into the wind. He's found more than a decade later, hiding out in India.
But in any event, at the.
Time he's gone missing in action. And the newspapers picked this up and they're like, you know, why did the District Attorney's office agree with this? You know what's going on here? This was all very bad press for mister Volobos, who was getting ready to run for reelection of the District Attorney of Cameron County. He needed a win, and he needed a win big. And right after all this happened is when Mariah died. And Melissa's the perfect target.
She's poor, she's Hispanic. There's a dead baby with a lot of bruises. This is the perfect vehicle for mister vo Lobos to go, I'm hard on crime, re elect me in a district attorney's office. So obviously Melissa gets convicted since to death, mister vo Lobos gets re elected and within a fairly reasonable time after mister Vio Lobos is reelected, that's when Pete Gilman goes to work for the district Attorney's office.
Un fucking believable. Please continue now.
I did an open records request to find out about the hiring process for mister Gilman, and what I found out was he was supposedly interviewed on an unknown or unstated date by mister vo Lobos himself, and was hired and had accepted the job before he'd even submitted a CV or a resume to the human resources department. He was hired first and then he submitted those papers, so that was kind of shady. And then you find out
that he gets a pretty good salary. District attorneys don't usually get paid the way attorneys in private practice do. It's usually a starter salary, a stepping stone to something bigger. He gets hired in at a pretty significant rate, and then his wife is also hired at the courthouse and between the two of them are bringing down a six figure salary.
Wow. You know, just when you think you've heard everything, and I always think every week I said, I think I've heard it all, and then there's this. I mean, Where where do these people come from? How do they sleep at night? I mean, just to recap, so he's accepted the job. We don't know exactly what it could have been before the trial. For all we know, right, he could have actually been working for the prosecution while supposedly defending Melissa. And let's just look at what he
did and did not do during the trial. This Gilman character failed to call as witnesses any of Melissa's children who had seen Mariah file down the stairs. Okay, that alone is fucking shocking. Then there was the social worker, right Norma Villanueva, to whom Melissa's daughter Alexandra bravely had said that she was the reason Mariah fell down the stairs. The social worker was instructed by Gilman to not alert anyone to this statement that sounds like the work of
an adjunct prosecutor. She was not, of course, called to testify. That testimony could have been extremely valuable. There was also a host of witnesses that were interviewed and or put on the stand by the state that together never placed Melissa alone with Mariah. Yet to that that no witness ever saw Melissa beat Mariah at any time, and Melissa and Riah whenever alone, we know that Farley's theory. A first year law student could have connected these dots and
shown that Farley's theory was nonsense. But none of that was ever done for the jury. And then just process this with me for a second.
Right.
So there's a horrible interview with Yilman after he had already joined the prosecutor's office formally, instead of only you know well anyway, but he said and I quote, she was not a good mother. Did she kill her child? I don't know? End quote.
Well, I can tell you something. When I interviewed Peter Gilman, because that's in the film, you would have thought that Melissa was his worst enemy. He had nothing nice to say about her. He went on and on. It was quite an extraordinary And.
I said to him, I kept asking him. I was like, what was your strategy? What was your strategy at Trout? And he couldn't answer. I think I asked him that question maybe seven times. What was your strategy? I mean, did you believe that it was an accident? Did you believe? He couldn't answer he had no strategy.
He had a strategy. It wasn't a defense strategy, but he had a strategy and to get himself a better job. So, in case you haven't heard enough yet, and in case you were looking for an even more terrible villain in this story, if such a thing as possible, boy, do we have one for you now. The elected district attorney, a gentleman named Armando via Lobos, and mister via Lobos was at the time of this all that stuff taking place. He himself was at the center of an FBI investigation,
and for good reason. There was a public scandal that emerged because he was using his office to enrich and empower himself through several different schemes, one of which was bribery in exchange for favorable outcomes at trial.
He was involved with cartels. He would bring lawyers and judges to Las Vegas and pretend to lose in poker games so you know, he could bribe them. It goes on and on. Basically, his agenda was to take money from, you know, people who could pay him, and then four people like Melissa he would use to be reelected. The moment he heard about Melissa's case, he was at the police station. I mean, while Melissa's being interrogated, I mean,
he's already there. He just completely used her case. You know, Margaret will tell you how very rare for DA's to actually get personally involved, you know, in cases. I mean, he even did the ending statement at her trial.
He not only did the ending statement, but he actually examined one of the state's witnesses, and he had the state's witness get up off the witness stand and pretend to shake a child like shaken baby syndrome, which has questionable scientific background, especially for a child of Mariah's age. If you talk to the scientists, they will tell you that a child is large as Mariah. If you'd shaken her heart enough to cause the brain to sort of shake back and forth inside the skull and be damaged,
you have to have broken her neck. But he nevertheless has this witness get up off the witness stand and stand in front of the jury and pretend to violently shake a child as a demonstration. You know, I don't know how intensely that played into the jury's verdict, but I'm sure it wasn't ignored.
And then he took part in this sentencing phase to make sure that she got death.
I mean, and he had to prove to the jury future dangerousness. Right, and Melissa had never been arrested before. And Melissa had no prior history of violence whatsoever. So all of a sudden, he needs to prove to the jury that you know, she is so violent that she actually might be a danger to prisoners, and that's why she needs to be on death throw. Right, Let's put
it this way. I mean, if Melissa Lucio is the type of person that is actually the most dangerous person in America, that she would end up on death row. I mean, you know, we were in trouble.
She wasn't even the most dangerous person in the courtroom. That DA was the most dangerous person in the courtroom. He was running a continuing criminal enterprise. He's doing backroom deals with cartels, He's bribing judges and lawyers. He's selling verdicts, letting murderers, serial murderers run free. I mean, this guy, he'd be a cartoon villain, except there's nothing funny about any of it. So we know how rare it is for prosecutors to be prosecuted. But this one the FBI
took very seriously and they got involved to say the least. Right, how did it end up?
Well?
I interviewed Michael Wynn, who was the lead prosecutor against Armando Villa Lobos, and of course I never had any contact with the ABI, but he told me that they were trying to get him because he was running for Congress and they wanted to make sure that that did not happen. So they were trying to get him, and they had so much on him.
You know.
The feedback that I got on that line was there was so much on mister Vio Lobos that they decided to stick to sort of their slam dunk case for conviction because they just needed him gone. And so Melissa's stuff, it came out a little bit in the Fiolobo's trial. The bit about at Livingstone and all of that did come out at trial, and Melissa's involvement and that came out in trial, but it was very, very limited. It wasn't the focus of their energies at mister Lobo's ateral criminal trup.
You know, I find that extraordinary as an outsider, that you know, you have, you know, a quarter pointed attorney who now works at the DA's office who basically did not defend Melissa at all, and then you have a DA who got thirteen years of federal prison. But you know that has nothing to do with Melissa's case, and you know her case should not be re examined. It's infuriating.
No, You're absolutely right. Every single case that this guy had anything to do with needs to be immediately reopened and thoroughly re examined. And I'm not saying, to be clear that everybody that he prosecuted is innocent, but a lot of them probably are. And in any case, it's abundantly clear that almost none of them could have possibly gotten a fair trial. And Melissa absolutely did not get what she is constitutionally guaranteed, which is a fair trial.
And what I find particularly shocking is that Gilman hasn't even been disbarred. I mean, this case is a literal poster child for ineffective assistance of counsel. But Melissa remains a death row to this very day, and the State of Texas is desperately continuing to try to execute her.
So her direct appeal was denied, you filed her state habeas and then it moved on to federal habeas and ended up in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is the conservative federal court that sits on top of Texas among other states.
And it's at that point that I ended up kind of being dropped out of the case. But what ended up happening there was ultimately the Fifth Circuit, a panel of the Fifth Circuit, three judges who initially heard the case, ordered that Melissa should get a new trial. The state was not happy with that outcome. They asked for what's called a rehearing en banc, which is a rehearing in front of all of the justices of the Fifth Circuit
Court of Appeals. The request for on bank rehearing was granted, and there was another argument, and just recently the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion which was deeply divided, that denied Melissa the right to a new trial and again affirmed what happened in the state court. So from here, she has basically ninety days from that date to file a request for her case to be heard of the United States Supreme Court, and.
They take what one percent of cases.
Probably probably less than one percent of the cases. So you know, her odds, you know, of having her case taken are not good. And you know, once it's in the Supreme Court, it can take a while. But if they a nicer it's all over. There are some additional
post conviction procedural maneuvers which may take place. Since I'm no longer her attorney, I don't know what they're going to be doing, but from my perspective, because the state used what I would consider to be junk science, the shaken baby testimony, the fall down the stairs can't cause the head injury testimony, that sort of thing, that potentially her new council could go back into the courts on what's called a junk science writ on her behalf, and
they may also be able to file a civil rights action on her behalf, maybe going back to some of the issues with mister vo Lobos, that the way that her case was even presented and ended up in the court in the first place was a result of a violation of her civil rights.
I asked you to please join me in supporting Melissa. The one simple step you can take is go to actionnetwork dot org that's a network dot org to sign a petition, and there will be more links in our bio for other constructive steps you can take. Your voice matters, so please spread the word, get involved. Let's save Melissa before it's too late and Sabrina, I watched your movie, and in no small part that's why we're here, because your movie is such a powerful piece of documentary filmmaking
and tells his story so hauntingly. How can people access the film, Well.
The film is called The State of Texas Versus Melissa being streamed right now. It's on Hulu.
And now we turn to the part of our show that always seems to be the best. Posing arguments and how this works is very simple. First of all, I want to thank are two esteemed guests for just coming and sharing your passion and your expertise. Of course I'm talking about Sabrina and Tassel and Margaret Schmucker. Thank you both again for being here.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you Jason so much.
Closing arguments works like this, I turn off my microphone, kick back in my chair and just listen to whatever you have to say, whatever you feel there is left to say after this extraordinary conversation. So we'll start off with Margaret, then Sabrina, and then Melissa.
I've talked about other lawyers in this I feel like I need to make it clear that you know, there's nothing I've said today that isn't readily available as a matter of court record. It's been in the state courts, it's been in the federal courts. If you've got the energy, you can go look it up. But you know, the key take home points. You know that there is and was, you know, some level of corruption involved in this case.
And that's of concern that there is evidence that you know, Melissa could not have caused more injuries in the timeframe that she was said to have caught them in, that she's never been violent with her kids. There is an absolute difference between physical abuse, which is a positive action, and neglect, which is an absence of an action, and her entire history is neglect because she just had too
many kids. And we have to always also be concerned about the fact that are we looking at all this evidence through the lens of sort of white privilege, and we have to take a step back and say, you can't do that. You have to look at it from her perspective and what was going on in her life and why she was acting the way she was. And of course for that we had doctor Pinkerman. And as to the physical stuff, obviously we have doctor Young who
has been very helpful in this case. I would really hope that at some point Melissa's case will get back into court and that she will be fully exonerated and will be set free to be with her children.
I want to say her name. Her name is Melissa Lucio, and she's been away from her children for thirteen years. She hasn't seen most of her kids in that length of time, and she's never seen her mother again. She's never seen her brothers and sisters. I mean, she's been all alone on death row, twenty four hours a day, waiting for her fate. And she's someone who didn't stand,
you know, a chance from the first day. And I hope and pray that, you know, people will get interested in her case and start tweeting about her and talking about her and raise this horrible story. You know, together we'll, you know, find a way to get her out of there.
And now we'll hear from Melissa.
My name is Melissa Elizabeth Lucio. I'm forty eight years old. I had fourteen children. It's been very hard to wake up each morning and not and I hear them calling out for me. The State of Texas wants to kill me.
Every day.
I ask God why I often think about my daughter Mariah. I've had a lot of dreams about her. I've dreamed that her and I are out there and that she's running around in her little dress, and she's wanted me to comb her hair, brush her hair, put Baretts on her hair, paint her nails, paint her toenails, and put
some lipstick on her lips. It's hard to have dreams about your children because when you wake up and then you see where you're at, you wish that it wouldn't happen a dream, that it would have been reality.
There are days that.
That I feel that I could just leave this place and be reunited with Mariah and just tell her I'm sorry that I wasn't there to protect her and I failed her. I failed her in any ways.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flamm. Please support your local innocence projects and go to the link in our bio to see how you can help. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Clyburn, and Kevin Warnis. The music on the show, as always, is by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction and
on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction. Podcast. Wrongful Conviction with Jason Flahm is a production of Lava for Good Podcasts and association with Signal Company Number one