The Catholic nun who wrote the book Dead Man Walking has joined in calls to save the life of Melissa Lucio, the Texas mother who is set to be put to death in just two weeks’ time for a crime she says she didn’t commit.
Sister Helen Prejean, who has spent decades campaigning for the death penalty to be abolished, wrote on social media that “psychological pressure and coercion” led Lucio to “admit to things that never happened”.
“Melissa Lucio was interrogated by investigators trained to extract confessions, not to find the truth,” she tweeted.
“When psychological pressure and coercion are applied with clinical precision, people buckle and admit to things that never happened.”
Sister Helen famously penned the 1994 book Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States after becoming the spiritual advisor to two men on death row - Patrick Sonnier and Robert Lee Willie - in the 1980s. She witnessed the executions of both men.
Following their deaths - and at a time when national support for the death penalty was at an all-time high - the Catholic nun released her book, sparking a nationwide debate about capital punishment.
The book famously inspired a Hollywood movie of the same name starring Susan Sarandon and Sean Penn.
Over the last few decades, Sister Helen has campaigned for the abolition of the death penalty and pushed the Catholic Church to condemn the death penalty in all circumstances.
The influential activist is now the latest among a growing number of people - including both Republican and Democratic lawmakers, Kim Kardashian and jurors from her trial - now fighting to stop Lucio being executed.
Lucio, a mother of 14 and victim of lifelong domestic violence, was sentenced to death in 2008 for the murder of her two-year-old daughter Mariah.
In February 2007, Mariah died from injuries which prosecutors claimed were caused by Lucio abusing her daughter.
Lucio, now 53, has always maintained her innocence and said that her daughter’s injuries were caused by a fall down the stairs two days earlier while the family was moving home.
The mother of 14, who is the first and only Hispanic woman on death row in Texas, has spent the last 14 years awaiting execution for a crime she says she didn’t commit.
In just over two weeks’ time - on 27 April - Lucio will be executed unless Texas Governor Greg Abbott or the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles grants her clemency or a stay of execution.
Lucio’s attorneys say that the only evidence to convict Lucio for her daughter’s murder was a false “confession” wrought through intense police questioning.
Hours after her child’s tragic death, she was subjected to a five-hour interrogation by armed, male police officers all the while she was pregnant with twins.
During the interrogation, Lucio asserted her innocence more than 100 times to the officers, according to the clemency application from her legal team.
But, because of her history as a victim of sexual abuse and domestic violence and the actions of the male officers who “manipulated” her, she was vulnerable to their “coercion”, her attorneys said.
After five hours, Lucio ended up admitting that she sometimes spanked Mariah and caused some bruising on her daughter’s body.
Her five words “I guess I did it” were taken by prosecutors as a confession for her murder.
Social work records show Lucio had no history of abusing her children and her attorneys say no crime was even committed, with Mariah’s death being “a tragedy, not a murder”.
The clemency application also argues that jurors were denied from hearing two key witnesses for the defence who were to testify that she gave a false confession to male authority figures due to her history of abuse and low IQ.
Medical experts have also said that Mariah’s injuries were likely to have been caused by a fall or an infection.
Meanwhile, the prosecutor who led the case against Lucio - Armando Villalobos - is now serving a 13-year federal prison sentence on charges of bribery and extortion connected to a wide-ranging Texas corruption ring.
The Independent has covered Lucio’s case for several months.
Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and consultant to Lucio’s legal team, previously told The Independentthat biases against women and people of colour also played a part in the death sentence handed to the Latino mother.
“Melissa’s entire life was shaped by the violence she experienced at the hands of men,” she said.
“But a jury was denied from hearing how her experiences of gender-based violence explained her behaviour in a way that is completely consistent with her innocence.”
With Lucio’s execution date looming, her attorneys filed an application for clemency last month.
Since then, her case has gained attention with Kardashian tweeting about Lucio’s plight to her 72 million followers and urging the Texas governor to grant clemency.
Five jurors from Lucio’s trial - four on the panel and one alternate - have also filed declarations saying they are concerned about evidence that was withheld from them at her trial and that they now support relief for the 53-year-old.
One juror Johnny Galvan Jr wrote in an editorial in the Houston Chronicle that he feels he was misled about the facts of the case and then succumbed to “peer pressure” in changing his sentencing vote from life in prison to the death penalty.
“If I had known all of this information, or even part of it, I would have stood by my vote for life no matter what anyone else on the jury said,” he wrote.
Lucio’s children have also filed letters urging the state of Texas to grant their mother clemency with her son John Lucio speaking out to plead that “I don’t wanna see my mom die”.
Texas state lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle are also now rallying behind Lucio.
Last week, a bipartisan group of state House representatives visited her on death row and prayed with her.
The seven, led by Democratic Rep. Joe Moody and Republican Rep. Jeff Leach, are among more than half of the state’s House of Representatives calling on Governor Abbott to commute her sentence.
Lucio’s execution date comes after years of fighting in vain to prove her innocence.
In 2019, she was granted a new trial after an appeals court agreed that her rights had been violated at her trial.
But this was swiftly undone when the state of Texas filed a petition and a court sided with it.
Last year, the US Supreme Court then denied a request to hear Lucio’s case, paving the way for Texas to set her execution date.
The Independent and the nonprofit Responsible Business Initiative for Justice (RBIJ) have launched a joint campaign calling for an end to death penalty in the US. The RBIJ has attracted more than 150 well-known signatories to their Business Leaders Declaration Against the Death Penalty - with The Independent as the latest on the list. We join high-profile executives like Ariana Huffington, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson as part of this initiative and are making a pledge to highlight the injustices of the death penalty in our coverage.
