Two days before her life was scheduled to end, Melissa Lucio could only wait and pray as a court considered whether her execution should proceed as planned.
She had already spent more than a decade on death row in Texas after being convicted of killing her two-year-old daughter, Mariah.
For years, Ms Lucio's supporters argued her case was fundamentally flawed, citing failures by police and the courts at every possible turn.
And in a rare show of unity, backers of the death penalty joined their political opponents, as well as advocates and celebrities, in calling for her death by lethal injection to be stopped.
That request has been granted, at least for now, with a Texas court issuing a last-minute stay of execution earlier this week.
But Ms Lucio's legal battle is far from over and the broader questions it raises about the US justice system may never be resolved.
The death of baby Mariah
Melissa Lucio grew up in poverty in the Rio Grande Valley, not far from the Mexico border.
She got married at the age of 16, hoping to escape from a childhood in which she suffered repeated sexual assault.
Instead, she was allegedly subjected to further violence by two partners.
By 2007, Ms Lucio was raising 12 children while pregnant with twins.
The family had been through bouts of homelessness as she grappled with substance abuse.
At times, she temporarily lost custody of some of her children, but her lawyers insist she was never abusive towards them.
According to her clemency application, Ms Lucio was packing up to move house on February 15 when she found Mariah crying at the bottom of an external flight of stairs.
Ms Lucio said she suspected her daughter may have fallen, but she seemed relatively unharmed.
Two days later, at their new house, the toddler went down for a nap and lost consciousness.
One of the paramedics who attended the scene noted it was "odd" Ms Lucio mentioned the stairs, given he had arrived at a single-storey building with only three steps.
Doctors also noticed extensive bruising on Mariah's body and passed their observations on to police.
Hours after Mariah's death, Ms Lucio was escorted from the hospital to an interrogation room where she was eventually charged with capital murder.
Did a lifetime of trauma lead to a false confession?
Sandra Babcock, a professor at Cornell Law School who later joined Ms Lucio's defence team, said her client's traumatic history was ignored during the gruelling questioning.
"Melissa's case is kind of a textbook example of the police making a series of blunders that were based on gendered assumptions about how a grieving mother should behave," Ms Babcock told the ABC.
"She has post-traumatic stress disorder from her child sexual abuse and domestic violence and she was experiencing all of the symptoms of trauma, numbness, dissociation. And the police misinterpreted those reactions.
"They had in mind that a grieving woman would be in hysterics."
In court, prosecutors claimed Ms Lucio had abused her daughter, pointing to bruising across Mariah's body and a fractured arm.
But her new lawyers argue crucial evidence was omitted from the trial.
They say her death was caused by internal injuries suffered during the fall, and that the accident also resulted in a blood-clotting disorder that would explain the bruises.
They also say the state's medical examiner failed to consider that Mariah had trouble walking due to a turned-in foot and had shown signs of excessive sleep and a loss of appetite — behaviour consistent with head trauma after a fall — in the days before she died.
Ms Lucio claimed her innocence more than 100 times during five hours of aggressive police questioning, before eventually stating: "I guess I did it."
"These were the kinds of tactics that really for anyone, were likely to elicit a false confession," Ms Babcock said.
"But for someone like Melissa, who has become practised at acquiescing to abusive men, it was practically foreordained that she would ultimately capitulate and tell them what they wanted to hear.
"And that's exactly what happened."
Even ardent death penalty supporters are 'shaken'
The plight of Ms Lucio, now 53, has elicited rare bipartisanship from Texas politicians.
More than half of the members of the state's House of Representatives — many of whom firmly back capital punishment — signed a letter to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles calling for her life to be spared.
Among them was Republican state representative Jeff Leach, who told The Guardian: "I'm not ashamed to say I believed in the death penalty for the most heinous cases.
"But this case is shaking my confidence in the system."
His party colleague, representative James White, also signed the letter and visited Ms Lucio in prison.
"I'm a supporter of the death penalty," he told the ABC.
"But I believe it has to be done constitutionally, I believe it has to be done just and rightly."
The case has drawn support from celebrity advocates such as Kim Kardashian, who has lobbied the White House for criminal justice reform, and Amanda Knox, who was wrongfully imprisoned for four years before being acquitted of her former roommate's death in Italy.
"It's natural to think, 'I would never confess to something I didn't do'. I certainly thought that before I found myself in an interrogation room," Ms Knox wrote on Twitter.
"I've written about my own coerced false admission many times, trying to understand it myself and to educate others about how innocent people can be pressured to implicate themselves. The more vulnerable they are, the easier it is for police to do so."
In granting the stay of execution, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has asked a trial court to review four claims made by Ms Lucio's lawyers.
They include whether prosecutors used false evidence to convict her and if previously unavailable scientific evidence would have prevented it.
Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said he was not surprised the stay was granted.
"Texas has a reputation for carrying out executions wantonly, almost randomly," he said.
"So Melissa Lucio was clearly in legitimate danger of being executed.
"But the types of claims that she had raised were the types of claims that Texas has granted stays of executions on in the past."
He says executing women in the United States is rare, accounting for only 17 of roughly 1,500 executions carried out since 1976.
If put to death, Ms Lucio would be the only Hispanic woman executed in Texas in that same period and the first female since 2014.
Mr Dunham said the new delay was only a temporary reprieve, with another lengthy legal tussle ahead.
First step in another long legal process
For now, Ms Lucio and her family are celebrating the opportunity for more time together.
When Mr Leach called her in prison to tell her about the court's decision, she broke down in tears.
"Oh my God, that is wonderful. What does that mean?" she asked him.
"Well, it means that you're going to wake up on Thursday morning," he replied.
Ms Babcock says her client is exhausted but appreciative of the support she has received.
"We haven't stopped fighting, I mean, this is just the first step.
"But we really do hope that one day she'll walk out of prison."
