THE lawyers of a Texas woman set to be executed next month asked state authorities yesterday to grant their client a reprieve, arguing she is the victim of a flawed prosecution and a botched trial.

Melissa Lucio, a 53-year-old Mexican-American, was found guilty in 2008 of the death of her two-year-old daughter Mariah, who died in 2007 after falling down the stairs.

Sentenced to the death penalty, her execution is scheduled for April 27 at Huntsville Penitentiary.

As the deadline nears, her attorneys have asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and Republican Governor Greg Abbott, to commute her sentence or delay her execution for 120 days.

The additional time, the lawyers say, would allow them to present “crucial” facts which will back their call for a new trial.

One of her lawyers, Tivon Schardl, said they were calling on the authorities to “allow Melissa to gather the rest of the evidence that’s out there to prove her innocence, to present it to a court so the court can decide whether to grant her a new trial.”

Her defence team argues that Lucio was presumed to be guilty by the police who questioned her for five hours, despite her more than 100 denials.

“Her interrogators refused to accept anything less than an admission to causing her daughter’s death,” Vanessa Potkin of The Innocence Project, a group which fights to reverse wrongful convictions, said.

A mother of 12 by the age of 37, Lucio had been sexually abused from childhood and had been beaten and raped by her two successive husbands.

She had fallen into despair and drug use, losing custody of her children for a time, before attempting to get her life back on track.

At the time of Mariah’s death, she was moving into a new apartment after leaving her second husband.

Her current defence team argues that her lawyer during the trial only presented the “bare minimum” of the abuse she suffered and that medical experts did not take into account the deceased child’s medical history, which included several handicaps likely to explain her fall.

Her lawyers also point to the “thousands of pages” of documents from Child Protection Services in which there was “never any accusation of abuse by any of her children throughout that entire time period,” Potkin said.

The Board of Pardons and Paroles is expected to issue its decision just days before Lucio’s scheduled execution date. – AFP, March 23, 2022.