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Melissa Lucio's conviction hinges on a late-night confession and misrepresentations of trauma.

The state of Texas has issued a death warrant seeking to execute Melissa Lucio (pictured), a battered woman who was sentenced to death for what may have…

Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit granted Lucio a new trial, finding that the trial court’s exclusion of testimony from the two experts had violated…

This is how The State of Texas vs. Melissa begins. Newly released on Amazon and other streaming platforms, the unsettling documentary by French director Sabrina Van Tassel raises questions about the conviction of Melissa Lucio, the first Hispanic woman on death row in Texas. Lucio was found guilty of abusing and killing her two-year-old daughter, Mariah, in 2007. The state argued that Lucio confessed to a pattern of abusing Mariah and to inflicting fatal blows to the child’s head. Lucio main...

Continuing an unparalleled pattern of rulings adverse to Texas death-row prisoners, a divided U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has reinstated the conviction and death sentence of a mother convicted of killing her two-year-old daughter in what, the defense has argued, was actually an accidental fall. In a 10-7 ruling issued a on February 9, 2021, the en banc court of appeals reversed a 2019 ruling by a unanimous three-judge panel of the same court, which had granted Melissa Lucio ...