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SIGN THE PETITION HERE:
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PASSAGE OF THE DAY: "Among the many legal questions at the heart of her case none is more germane than whether a crime was actually committed — multiple experts support the idea that Mariah’s accidental fall down a rickety flight of outdoor stairs two days before her death was almost surely the cause. But there is another question in Lucio’s case, more difficult to answer, and perhaps more insidious, too. How did she wind up charged in the first place? In criminal cases, confessions are the most powerful evidentiary weapon for prosecutors. It is notoriously difficult for any defense attorney to convince a jury to acquit when a defendant has confessed. Yet a growing body of research points to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault as particularly vulnerable to the psychological tactics law enforcement uses to elicit confessions. Such tactics include intimidation, threats, coercion and outright lies — all present in Lucio’s interrogation. Many of these tactics are outlawed in other countries — England, Iceland, Australia, Canada and others now use a system called PEACE in which the primary goal of an interrogation is to discover what happened; in the United States, however, the goal is a confession — no matter that it may be false, or that it may have been coerced. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, nearly three-quarters of the cases in which women were exonerated were found to have no crime at all. Many of these tend to be cases of mistaken shaken baby syndrome, or SIDS, or undiagnosed health conditions — again, true of Mariah, who had balance issues and a history of falling, even knocking herself unconscious once. Similarly, in exonerations won by the Innocence Project in which there was faulty forensic science — which appears likely here — more than a quarter involved false confessions."
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PASSAGE TWO OF THE DAY:
And Lucio’s case is not an anomaly. From the Salem witch trials all the way to the Central Park Five, false confessions have a long history in our legal system. Dozens of cases involving false confessions where a woman is suspected to have killed a child have emerged in recent decades. All of them were eventually released, but only after spending in some cases decades behind bars. Debra Milke and Nicole Harris both falsely confessed to killing their four-year-old sons (Harris only after a twenty-seven hour interrogation). Lacresha Murray falsely confessed to the death of a child she was babysitting. Sabrina Butler and Abigail Tiscareno both falsely confessed to killing their children. Later, Sabrina Butler would write about her interrogation: “He yelled at me for three hours. No matter what I said, he screamed over and over that I had killed my baby. I was terrified. I was put in jail and not allowed to attend Walter’s funeral . . . I was a teenager who, less than 24 hours before, had lost my precious baby boy. Ambitious men questioned, demoralized and intimidated me. In that state of mind, I signed the lies they wrote on a piece of paper. I signed my name in tiny letters in the margin to show some form of resistance to the power they had over me.”
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COMMENTARY: "How did an innocent Texas mother end up on death row," by Rachel Louise Snyder, published by medium.com, on April 24, 2022. (Rachel Louise Snyder (@rlswrites) is the author of No Visible Bruises, a 2019 Top Ten book of the year by the New York Times and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in nonfiction. Her forthcoming memoir, Women We Buried, Women We Burned, will be published in March 2023. She is a professor at American University.)
GIST: "In the summer of 2008, Melissa Lucio was sentenced to death for the murder of her two-year-old daughter, Mariah. Her execution is scheduled for April 27th if Governor Greg Abbott doesn’t intervene. Even for a woman on death row, Lucio’s case has received an immense amount of interest. There is a Hulu documentary about her, a segment on “Last Week Tonight” with John Oliver (examining the faulty appeals process), and a feature by the Marshall Project, among others. Pearl Jam and Kim Kardashian have called for amnesty. Among the many legal questions at the heart of her case none is more germane than whether a crime was actually committed — multiple experts support the idea that Mariah’s accidental fall down a rickety flight of outdoor stairs two days before her death was almost surely the cause. But there is another question in Lucio’s case, more difficult to answer, and perhaps more insidious, too. How did she wind up charged in the first place?
In criminal cases, confessions are the most powerful evidentiary weapon for prosecutors. It is notoriously difficult for any defense attorney to convince a jury to acquit when a defendant has confessed. Yet a growing body of research points to victims of domestic violence and sexual assault as particularly vulnerable to the psychological tactics law enforcement uses to elicit confessions. Such tactics include intimidation, threats, coercion and outright lies — all present in Lucio’s interrogation. Many of these tactics are outlawed in other countries — England, Iceland, Australia, Canada and others now use a system called PEACE in which the primary goal of an interrogation is to discover what happened; in the United States, however, the goal is a confession — no matter that it may be false, or that it may have been coerced. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, nearly three-quarters of the cases in which women were exonerated were found to have no crime at all. Many of these tend to be cases of mistaken shaken baby syndrome, or SIDS, or undiagnosed health conditions — again, true of Mariah, who had balance issues and a history of falling, even knocking herself unconscious once. Similarly, in exonerations won by the Innocence Project in which there was faulty forensic science — which appears likely here — more than a quarter involved false confessions.
And Lucio’s case is not an anomaly. From the Salem witch trials all the way to the Central Park Five, false confessions have a long history in our legal system. Dozens of cases involving false confessions where a woman is suspected to have killed a child have emerged in recent decades. All of them were eventually released, but only after spending in some cases decades behind bars. Debra Milke and Nicole Harris both falsely confessed to killing their four-year-old sons (Harris only after a twenty-seven hour interrogation). Lacresha Murray falsely confessed to the death of a child she was babysitting. Sabrina Butler and Abigail Tiscareno both falsely confessed to killing their children. Later, Sabrina Butler would write about her interrogation: “He yelled at me for three hours. No matter what I said, he screamed over and over that I had killed my baby. I was terrified. I was put in jail and not allowed to attend Walter’s funeral . . . I was a teenager who, less than 24 hours before, had lost my precious baby boy. Ambitious men questioned, demoralized and intimidated me. In that state of mind, I signed the lies they wrote on a piece of paper. I signed my name in tiny letters in the margin to show some form of resistance to the power they had over me.”
To understand why someone would confess to a crime she didn’t commit, it is important to understand the power dynamics of an abuser and a victim. Melissa Lucio was sexually abused starting at age six — and disbelieved by her mother at the time, her primary authority figure. She was a child bride, married to Guadeloupe Lucio at age sixteen (he was twenty) and she had five children by the age of twenty-four — all of which speaks to a loss of bodily autonomy at an early age. Two months after he left her, when she was twenty-six, she moved in with Roberto Alvarez, and together they had seven more children, including Mariah. Both men were abusive. Lucio called the police on Alvarez, though he appears never to have been charged. He kicked her with a steel-toed boot. He strangled her until she saw stars. A school principal once saw him punch Lucio. He raped her — she never called the police because she didn’t know marital rape was a crime. Indeed, rape as a form of control is as common in domestic violence as in war. From her cell on death row, Lucio told me through her attorney that she never left Alvarez because he threatened to kill her if she tried.
Both Alvarez and Lucio had struggled with addiction, and their family was homeless for a time. Child Protective Services were in and out of the family’s life. In thousands of pages of CPS records, Alvarez’s violence was recorded, but there is no indication that Lucio was ever violent with any of her children. At the time of Mariah’s death, Lucio had been clean for more than a year. Alvarez was not.
The day Mariah fell down the stairs, the family was moving from one apartment to another. Over the course of the next two days Mariah was groggy. She tried to eat but vomited. She complained of thirst and seemed to be having trouble breathing — all signs of a traumatic brain injury, though Lucio and Alvarez, understandably, did not know this. Lucio thought she had a cold and let Mariah sleep while she organized the new apartment.
But by that evening Mariah was dead. And from the moment the EMTs arrived to find the child, Lucio became a suspect. In her trial, a paramedic named Daniel Nestor described Lucio as, “somewhat distressed, but distant,” and Alvarez as “non-distressed and distant.” But strangely Nestor went on to only focus on her, “She wasn’t really crying or showing a lot of emotion. She was extremely calm for the situation.” A week later, several of Lucio’s children would tell a CPS caseworker that their mother was scared, but the paramedic did not see fear when he looked at her. What Nestor saw was not a mother with eight other children, in shock, exhausted and in fact pregnant with twins in her first trimester, but a woman not following the stereotypical playbook of motherhood. He didn’t understand his own implicit bias and this set in motion a presumption of guilt that would, in the end, condemn a woman to death who is almost surely innocent.
The interrogations of Lucio and Alvarez offer a unique opportunity to see the ways in which gender discrimination and implicit bias informed all that came next. They were interviewed at the same police station, by some of the same detectives, yet with vastly different interactions and outcomes. Law enforcement decided immediately that Mariah’s death was a murder, even though the autopsy wouldn’t happen for another two days (at which point the medical examiner was not so much solving a mystery, as searching for clues to support a faulty theory). Lucio’s interrogation was an absolute reenactment of the dynamics of domestic violence, where a victim is isolated, cornered, threatened, coerced, where she eventually comes to believe there is no escape save for her own acquiescence. Victims of domestic violence comply because to them it is often a negotiation for their lives. They recant not because they are unreliable, but because system after system has prioritized an abuser’s freedom over a victim’s safety.
Both Lucio and Alvarez were taken from the hospital to the police station, where they sat in separate interrogation rooms. Upon greeting Alvarez, detectives told him they were sorry for his loss; Lucio, on the other hand, was immediately read her Miranda rights. For the next five hours, detectives interrupted her every time she insisted she had not beat Mariah. One hundred and twenty-one times she denies hurting her daughter. Seventy times she is interrupted, to Alvarez’s once. A series of detectives threaten her, insult her and scream in her face. One man towers over Lucio, his gun at eye level just inches away from her face, his body curving slightly so he is crowding her. They call her a cold-blooded killer and threaten that she won’t be able to attend Mariah’s funeral. One detective says her other children will not cover for her and that she has “no feelings, no remorse, no guilt, nothing, sitting there with a blank stare.” She is accused of not monitoring how much water Mariah drank, of not forcing her to eat when she wasn’t hungry. “…there’s no nutrition whatsoever,” says a Detective named Cruz. “She doesn’t eat all day and it doesn’t bother you.” Another shouts, “Do you even feel sorry for this little girl?” Later, they accuse her of neglect: “you’re the mom. You’re just saying you don’t know what happened?” They ask her “what kind of a mother would you think would leave their child to lay in bed and sleep without food…? If you’re such a good mother, you need to … tell us exactly what happened.” Over and over they rail against what a nurturing mother is supposed to do and how Lucio has failed. No context is afforded Lucio by detectives. Her “blank stare” becomes evidence of guilt, rather than grief and shock. Her lack of visible feeling makes her a “cold-blooded killer” rather than a terrified and exhausted victim of violence, taught over a lifetime of trauma to acquiesce to authority. Alvarez’s fathering is never questioned. He is never accused of neglect, and never bears the responsibility of feeding and nurturing the children. Indeed, when he claims to have never once changed a diaper for any of the couple’s many children, rather than accuse him of being a bad father, or a neglectful parent, they simply ignore it.
Lucio’s interrogation is an hours-long monologue by detectives in which they offer her various scenarios about how she might have killed Mariah, whereas Alvarez is given the room to tell his whole story. A Texas Ranger named Victor Escalon takes over Lucio’s interrogation after detectives fail to elicit a confession; he already knows she did it, he lies, so if she just confesses, it’ll be easier for her. In a 2015 study of the role of stereotypes in in the wrongful convictions of women, authors Andrea Lewis and Sara Sommervold write how “law enforcement officers, consciously or unconsciously, use the bad woman stereotype and the female monster archetype to structure their interrogations of female suspects.” Sometimes wrote the researchers, the interrogators even “articulate the stereotypes that are informing their theories of the woman’s guilt.” A fact transparent in Lucio’s interrogation given the stark differences of Alvarez’s.
The investigators showed her pictures of her daughter’s body and asked her about the bruises covering Mariah’s body. Lucio said she could not explain them. “I did not bruise her up like that,” she said. (In fact, the bruising likely stems from a blood coagulation disorder after her fall that kept her body from internally clotting, not an unknown symptom of the kind of traumatic brain injury that was ultimately cited as her cause of death).
At 1:22 am, the camera is turned away from Lucio, but remains on for another seventeen minutes. Escalon says he is going to take a DNA sample by taking her hair down, combing it, and then putting it back up in a ponytail himself. The message to a victim like Lucio is clear: he, and not she, has autonomy over her body. It is a message particularly powerful to trauma victims.
Escalon would later tell the jury that he knew the minute he walked in the room that Lucio was guilty by her slumped posture and her lack of affect. “I knew right then and there,” he testified, even though science has repeatedly debunked the idea that body language is universally readable, or that police are any better at reading it than civilians. Even the idea that Lucio had a flat affect is questionable; she cries, she looks downcast, she covers her eyes with her hand. Escalon seemed to have more allegiance to a confession than to the truth of what happened. Dave Thompson, a trainer and an expert in interrogation techniques by law enforcement, says there are three elements that tend to emerge in such cases: 1. Misclassification (an accident becomes a murder), 2. Coercion (if you tell the truth, things will be easier for you), and 3. Contamination (repeatedly showing photos of a bruised, dead child while making absolute statements about cause). Thomas said all three were present in Lucio’s interrogation and that, in fact, her alleged confession was merely a “regurgitation of what was told to her.” When she tells detectives, “I wish I were dead,” it underscores her guilt, rather than her grief to them. Escalon was using an coercive interrogation called the Reid Technique, which trains law enforcement to read such signs as downcast eyes and crossed arms as lying, and has been consistently shown to be prone to false confessions.
After he puts her hair in a ponytail, the video remains off for eighty-seven minutes, until 2:59 a.m. What happens in those eighty-seven minutes, the conversation between Escalon and Lucio, is anyone’s guess. But when the camera comes back on, Lucio says, “I guess I did it.” Such tentative language is indicative of false confessions, according to Dr. Gisli Gudjonsson, one of the world’s leading researchers on trauma and confessions. Phrasing like “I must have, I did, I think,” all “betray uncertainty and inference,” he wrote in overview of the literature of the psychology of confessions. Those five words from Lucio were the primary evidence for the prosecution.
When the video returns, there is a doll in front of Lucio, and Escalon says, “What I want you to do, Melissa, we had talked about it. Is I want you to show us how you hit the baby. Okay? I’m going to get these pictures and I want to go over them with you.” Lucio who, like Alvarez, had admitted to spanking her children for punishment sometimes, thwacked the doll on the backside. “No, do it harder,” Escalon coached. She says, “I don’t know what you want me to do.” He takes the baby from her, beats it hard with his palm, and then tells her to do it. She complies.
In Alvarez’s interrogation there is no doll, there are no hypothetical scenarios about his losing it with his kids. No one screams in his face or combs his hair. There is no DNA sample.
One authority figure after another allowed their own biases to assert a woman’s guilt before a crime was even determined. Lucio’s flawed case shows the absolute stakes of gender discrimination for women. Our legal system is built on the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. The paramedics to the detectives presumed Lucio’s guilt and then built a case fueled by these implicit biases. In the end, perhaps most telling of all is the radical disparity of Alvarez’s and Lucio’s outcomes. In closing arguments, even the prosecutor on Alvarez’s case referred to him as a “nonviolent man” so irrelevant is the fact of a woman’s abuse. Alvarez served four years and is out now. Lucio, of course, got the death penalty. She has three days left.
The entire commentary can be read at:
https://medium.com/@RachelLSnyder/how-did-an-innocent-texas-mother-end-up-on-death-row-e8e39a1f1db5
