A Texas appeals court on Monday suspended the execution scheduled for Wednesday of Melissa Lucio, an American mother sentenced to death for the murder of her daughter after a controversial trial, her lawyers announced. Another Texas court will have to consider “new evidence of his innocence“, they said in a press release.
“I am grateful to the court for giving me the chance to live and prove my innocence” et “to have more days to be a mother to my children and a grandmother to my grandchildren“said Melissa Lucio.
“The stay granted by the court allows us to continue to fight alongside Melissa to have her wrongful conviction overturned.“, said his lawyer Vanessa Potkin.
In recent weeks, calls for clemency from personalities like Kim Kardashian had multiplied in favor of this mother of 14 children of Hispanic origin, the interest in her case even crossing the American borders.
In 2007, her 2-year-old daughter Mariah was found dead in her home, covered in bruises, days after falling down stairs. Melissa Lucio, with a life marked by both physical and sexual assault, drug addiction and precarious conditions, was immediately suspected of having hit her. She had been sentenced to death. But the handicaps of the girl, likely to explain her fall, had not been taken into account by the experts, according to her defense, which ensures that the bruises could have been caused by a blood circulation disorder. None of Melissa’s children had accused her of being violent.
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