Texas mother set for execution - yet evidence suggests she did not kill her child
On the evening of 15 February 2007, a team of five police officers in Cameron county, Texas, began an interrogation of a Mexican American mother whom they suspected of having murdered her two-year-old child.
Melissa Lucio was in a vulnerable condition. She was pregnant with twins and in the grip of shock and grief. Just two hours earlier her youngest child Mariah had been pronounced dead having fallen unconscious.
The officers did not let the suspect’s vulnerabilities get in the way of the inquisition. Over almost six hours, stretching late into the night, they applied to Lucio the notorious “Reid Technique” – a controversial interrogation method that has led to numerous wrongful convictions in the US.
As trained to do under the system, the officers put their faces within inches of Lucio’s, screaming at her that she “had to know” what had happened to her child. They had “lots of evidence” that she was to blame for the death, they said, forcing her to view photographs of the girl’s lifeless body.
Then, as the Reid method dictates, they abruptly switched tone. They gently reassured her that she could “put this to rest” if she would only confess to having caused the toddler’s death.
Lucio insisted over 100 times that night that she was innocent. But after more than five hours of aggressive “maximization” and “minimization”, as the technique is known, she reached break point.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/21/texas-woman-death-row-melissa-lucio
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She does not stand a prayer in Texas. Fcuk Abbott and the chair he rode in on.
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