Since the initial release of our coverage of Melissa Lucio's case, there have been some developments. This is a re release of that coverage with brand new content. 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 and broiled it up 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 fatal 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. 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. To tell this incredible, heroin and urgent story, we have with us Sabrina van Tasseled. 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 to Wronful Conviction, Thank you so much. And with her is a Texas attorney named Margaret Schmucker, and Margaret has been a fierce advocate for Melissa as her habeas attorney. Margaret, welcome to Ronful Conviction.
Thank you for having me.
And thank you both for being here. So over the past few years, Sabrina has visited Melissa Lucia 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 that 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. She did tell her mother that the boyfriend was sexually 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, Mariah. So before Mariah died, there were five from the first guy and seven from Robert Alvarez, for a total of twelve. So 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 old 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 all of it,
or to I don't know, maybe forget their troubles. Melissa and robert were using drugs out of the site 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 several 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 less 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 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 are 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 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 exterior door 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 her 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 go, oh, you know, a kid can't get this injured falling down two or three stairs.
My name is doctor Thomas Young. I am a forensic pathologist. Back in twenty ten, I was contacted by Margaret Schmucker on the case of Texas versus Melissa Lucio, Melissa Lucio's little girl. She was not noted at first to have any significant bruising, and eventually she came to the point here where she stopped breathing. The bruising that was noted later on was not present at first. It developed over time. When a child the age of Mariah has even a
minor head injury, some children will develop brain swelling. The reasons for the brain swelling are not always entirely clear, but this has been called malignant brain edema. What ends up happening here with the brain swelling is the pressure becomes high enough in the head that there isn't adequate blood from the usual blood pressure coming from the heart
to allow circulation to blood through the brain. So as the brain swells, there's less blood flow to the brain, and that causes the brain to be starved for oxygen and blood flow, which causes more swelling, which causes less circulation to the brain. What you have there is a vicious cycle as the brain is being damaged here from a lack of oxygen, there are substances that are released
into the bloodstream that can cause widespread clotting. Clotting factors that normally circulate in the blood will be triggered and consumed, just like kindling into a fire. And so what then happens here is that her clotting factors disappear, and this leads to very very easy bleeding beneath the skin. So any movement on the child's part, or even any minor handling of the child can lead the bruising.
And so the EMS 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 PlayStation.
Okay, so when Mariah was pronounced dead in the er, she was examined, initially by an r physician named Vargas.
The autopsy later revealed pooling a blood in the cranial ball, which forms the opinion about head trauma as the cause of death, but at this time Bargas noted no outer signs of head injury and what appeared to be evidence of significant physical abuse in the form of injuries and widespread bruising in various stages of healing, including pulled hair, a broken arm from two to seven weeks prior, and an injury that Bargas he mistook it for a bite mark,
but as was explained, the CPS reports documented a history of inter sibling violence. Then you not only have the external injuries from the fall down the stairs, but also the internal chain reaction that led to her death among other medical issues, and as was explained by doctor Young, all the clotting factors in her bloodstream had been used up, causing widespread bleeding under the skin, resulting in bruises under even the slightest pressure, let alone CPR. This condition is
commonly known as DEIC, which is disseminated intravascular coagulation. And so with the appearance of all her prior injuries are the ones that stayed on the stairs and then the bruising from DIC, her poor little body looked like it had been through a horrific ordeal. So you can easily see how there's a straight line from Vargas's report of what appears to be rampant child abuse and Melissa's terribly flawed interrogation.
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 begins 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 falls 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 being 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 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 Tarriget went so far as to ask Willista to demonstrate the spanking on a doll, and it was encouraged by the investigator to spank the doll harder, right, I mean, and this is on video, right, show me how you.
Would do it, but I mean the way you actually did it.
Just give on her back.
We'll do it real hard, do it. But the way you would do it.
I mean, I wouldn't found on her.
M hmm.
It was it harder.
Because I just I will do it hard.
Well, you're doing it on yourself.
This is.
I mean, I wasn't polling on her.
Yes, okay, and this is just what it waspect.
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 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 was 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 that we had. You know, we never heard from any of the children that she provided physical discipline, 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.
Noises?
Maybe it not hurt.
Is there anything else you want to add? Okay, 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 this theory right. So on Monday February nineteenth, two thousand and seven, Escalon went to the chief forensic pathologist of Carmen and Hidalgo Counties, a woman named Norman Jean Farley, after having extracted this coerced and patently false statement, which I think it can be said was at least leading information, and that's probably too gentle of a word, and then Farley made her findings, ruling that due to the presence of blood in the
cranial vault, that the cause of death was in fact blunt force had trauma. And then she went on during the trial to say that a fall down those same rickety stairs could not possibly have been the cause of blood force head trauma. But that doesn't sound anything like science. That sounds like pure conjecture, right.
Absolutely.
My name is doctor Thomas Young. 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 blind 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. 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 does she know that you cannot get blad trauma from a fall 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 short flight of stairs and have a fatal head injury. All I can say is Norma Farley 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.
Yeah, it 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. So 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, even though 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. And Norma Jean Farley, again as the chief forensic pathiylogist, 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. We of course, now know that one can experience up to seventy two hours of lucidity after blunt force head trauma as the brain swelling and bleeding develops over time, resulting in an eventual death. So, like so many instances in which the doctor is trying to diagnose child abuse, Farley's
assertion here is one of many leaps in logic. And Farley continued to testify 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 so the new place, or in transit about whether or not Melissa was ever alone with Mariah.
Melyssa 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.
How could you possibly be alone in a two room or so apartment with nine kids, It's preposterous.
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. 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.
My colleague, Normal Villanueva, was a social worker, and she and I developed different theories about the case as we went along. In our meetings with the defense team. We raised questions in our meetings to the second Chay Council, just sort of asking is it possible that we could take a look at these issues and concerns that individual deferred to the lead attorney, mister Gilman. I was not asked to provide any testimony during the guilt innocence phase
of the trial, but in the sentencing phase. I felt my testimony was abbreviated 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 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 the evident.
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 will 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 prosecutors 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 seasoned 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.
Mister Livingston ends up, I.
Believe, pleading guilty to murder, but with the agreement of the District attorney's office, Armanda Vielobos, 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. 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? This was all very bad press for mister vo Loobos, 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 to 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 CD 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.
Wow, you know, just when you think you've heard everything, 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 Melissa's children who had seen mariafle 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. 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 Gilman 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.
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 troll? 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 Villa 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 for 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 scientist, they will tell you that a child as large as Mariah, if you'd shaken her hard 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 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. 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 and that's why she needs to be on death row. 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 later was there was so much on mister Volobos 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, and the bit about a living and Melissa's involvement, and that came out on trial, but it was very very limited. It wasn't the focus of their energies at mister Vealogos's federal criminal truth.
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.
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 if 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 a panel of the Fifth Circuit three judges 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 Appeal. The request for on bank rehearing was granted, and just recently the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion which was deeply divided, that denied Melissa the right to a new trial and again affirm what happened in the state court. So from here she has to file a request for her case to be heard in the United States Supreme Court.
And we pick what one percent of cases.
Probably probably less than one percent of the cases, so you know her adds you know of having our case taken are not good and 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.
We had a chance to speak with Melissa's current counsel, Vanessa Potkin, who heads up Melissa's team from the Innocence Project in New York. Vanessa, please bring us up to date on what has been filed on Melissa's behalf and where we're at now.
In the middle of January, the state of Texas set an execution date for Melissa Lucio for April twenty seventh, and after that date was set, the Innocence Project joined
Melissa's legal team. We recognize the urgency that was involved here and that Texas was on the verge of executing an innocent woman, and so we teamed up to look into the forensic issues that existed at the time of trial, and since that time have just worked with over seven new forensic and medical experts that supported a clemency petition that was filed on Melissa's behalf on March twenty second and we're also looking into, you know, whether we can
get back into court with some of this new evidence that supports Melissa's innocence and that no court has ever considered.
It's so terrifying that here we are again on the verge of another state, another Southern state, in this case, executing another innocent person and Vanessa. My understanding is that there's a politically diverse array of groups and folks who have made their concerns known about this initizen woman who, let's face it, she suffered a grave tragedy that was bad enough, right she lost her little daughter and now
has had that tragedy. Can you tell us about this coalition that's joined together and supported this innocent woman, Melissa Lucio.
What we're seeing is really unprecedented here. There is a group of nearly one hundred lawmakers from Texas Republicans and Democrats that have come forward to try to stop this execution and to call on the Board of Partments and Parole and Governor Abbott to issue clemency here. And I
think that's reflective of this innocence claim. And people are seeing that this was a rush to judgment, that there's evidence of Melissa's innocence that no court has ever considered, and just what is at stake here if this execution goes forward. So you have people who are proponents of the death penalty stepping in and saying, you know, this can't go forward because there's too much doubt, there's too much inequity between the sentence that Melissa got and what
her husband got. There's too many questions given this new medical evidence of her innocence.
Right, I mean, there's a tremendous outpouring of support, hundreds of faith based groups, dozens of anti domestic violence and sexual assault groups, hoops ex hoonnaies themselves, death row ex honeries. It's all over social media now. Kim Kardashian and the people who are most affected by this, right, the brothers and sisters of the little girl who tragically died, are unanimous in their support of their mother, and they were there absolutely.
They lost their youngest sibling and their mother has been you know, on death row for nearly a decade and a half now, and so I imagine the trauma that this family has endured in executing her for something she didn't do. For what was a tragedy, not a crime. Would just exponentially increase the injustice in the family's pain.
But still these efforts, which would seem to be you know, a tidal wave, haven't been enough yet anyway, So if our audience wants to join, which there's still more to be done, She's still sitting on death row. So what can people do to help?
So we would ask people to go to Save Melissa dot org. There's a petition. Sign your name to the petition. If you live in Texas, call Governor Abbott and the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole and let them know that you support clemency for Melissa Lucio. If you live in Texas, you can call the Cameron County District Attorney
and ask him to withdraw Melissa Lucio's execution date. If you can make a video, a post a story about Miss Lucio's case on Instagram, TikTok, or any other platform and use the hashtag save Melissa Lucio, We're.
Going to put links in the bio to all of these different actions that you can take. Every single person, make your voice heard, and let's save Melissa Lucio's life before it's too late. And now we turn to the part of our show that always seems to be the best. Closing 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 van 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, kicked 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. 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. There is evidence that you know, Melissa could not have caused more injuries in the time frame that she was said to have cast women, that she's never been violent with her kids.
There is an absolute difference between physical abuse, which is an 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.
I would really hope that.
At some point Melissa's case we'll get back into court and that she will be fully exonerated and will be set free to be with her children.
She's been away from her children for thirteen years. She hasn't seen most of her kids and that 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 that throw twenty four hours a day, waiting for her fate. And she's someone who didn't stand 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 have fourteen children. It's been very hard to wake up each morning and not and now I hear them calling out for me. The state of Texas wants to kill me every day. I asked 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 wanting 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 I feel that I could just leave this place and be reunited with Mariah.
And just.
I'm sorry that I wasn't there to protect her and I failed her. I failed her in many ways.
Thank you for listening to Wrongful Conviction. I'd like to thank our production team Connor Hall, Jeff Kleibern, and Kevin Wardis, with research by Lyla Robinson. The music in this production was supplied by three time OSCAR nominated composer Jay Ralph. Be sure to follow us on Instagram at Wrongful Conviction, on Facebook at Wrongful Conviction Podcast, and on Twitter at wrong Conviction, as well as at Lava for Good. On all three platforms, you can also follow me on both
TikTok and Instagram at It's Jason Flahm. Wrongful Conviction is the production of Lava for Good podcast and association with Signal Company Number one