Ex Parte Melissa Elizabeth Lucio

Brief Filed: 4/22
Court: Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas
Year of Decision: 2022

Read full-text amicus brief (PDF, 570KB)opens in new window

Involves a legal challenge to death penalty in Texas based on a confession obtained in a manner that increased the risks that the confession was false.

False Confessions

Melissa Lucio was sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of her 2-year old daughter Mariah, who died two days after a fall down a flight of stairs. Ms. Lucio was brought in and questioned late at night for 5 hours, beginning two hours after her daughter died. Part of the confession was videotaped. After hours of denying that she hit her child and in the face of persistent interrogation, around 3:00 a.m., Ms. Lucio said “I guess I did it.” She has an IQ of 85. The videotaped confession played to the jury shows the interrogator, using a doll, asking Lucio to demonstrate how she “spanked” her daughter, and when she didn’t spank hard enough, he spanked the doll himself. Lucio’s 11 older children repeatedly said she did not physically harm them or Mariah, but they were not allowed to testify at trial.

At trial, the defense proffered expert psychological testimony regarding the effects of abuse and the conditions of the interrogation that could lead to a false confession, but the court excluded that testimony during the culpability stage. Based largely on the taped “confession”, Ms. Lucio was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.

In 2019 a unanimous three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals granted Lucio a new trial, but a divided en banc panel overruled 10-7 to uphold the lower court decision. In October 2021, the Supreme Court denied her petition for review.

APA’s brief updates prior APA amicus briefs providing the most recent science on the interrogation conditions likely to give rise to false confessions.

On April 25, 2022, after APA filed its brief, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals stayed the order of execution against Ms. Lucio (PDF, 575KB)opens in new window and remanded the case to the trial court for that court to evaluate Ms. Lucio’s claims of false confession and actual innocence as well as claims that the State had wrongfully suppressed exculpatory evidence.