A psychologist explains how myths and biases can prompt false allegations—and irreversible mistakes, especially in cases involving trauma victims like
Melissa Lucio.
On April 27th, Melisa Lucio is scheduled to be executed in Texas for the murder of her daughter, but many are now scrutinizing the evidence used to convict her—including a dubious confession and autopsy—and wondering if any “crime” even occurred. Her case is the subject of the 2020 documentary, “The State of Texas vs. Melissa.” What does psychological science say about the evidence against her?
The Death
In February 2007, Melissa Lucio’s 2-year-old daughter Mariah fell down a steep flight of wooden stairs outside of the apartment complex where she lived with her husband and children. 2 days later, Mariah was found unresponsive around 7 P.M. and taken to a nearby hospital, where she was pronounced dead on arrival, with the cause of death listed as “blunt force head trauma.”
The Hunch
That evening, police began to suspect that Melissa had killed her daughter because of her seemingly unusual demeanor. At trial, numerous officers recalled that Melissa was “calm” as EMTs tried to revive Mariah; one EMT described Melissa as “extremely calm for the situation,” which he called “far out of the ordinary.” Similarly, a detective noted that Melissa “slouched” and was “not making eye contact,” which he interpreted as a sign that “she did something [and] was ashamed of what she did.” But are these beliefs justified?
Around the world, most people—including police—believe that nonverbal behaviors, such as eye contact and posture, reveal when a person is lying. However, there is ample evidence that these behaviors are, at best, weak and unreliable cues to deception, leading experts to conclude that “nothing similar to Pinocchio’s growing nose actually exists.” Accordingly, people tend to be quite poor at detecting lies—and while police are no better, they tend to be overconfident in their ability to detect lies, which can result in an innocent person being subjected to a high-pressure interrogation.
The Interrogation
At 9:53 P.M., 2 hours after her daughter’s death, police began to interrogate Melissa. At first, they suggested that Melissa—a recovering drug addict—had killed her daughter while intoxicated and therefore didn’t remember it. Later, one detective threatened to “beat [her] half to death like that little child was beaten,” while another suggested that the murder was “an accident”—the result of “frustration that went a little too far”—all while showing her photos of her daughter’s corpse. Finally, they gave her a doll and demanded that she demonstrate how she had beaten and bitten Mariah. Around 3:15 A.M, after five hours and countless denials, Melissa finally told police what they wanted to hear: “I guess I did it.”
In the wake of hundreds of known false confessions, psychologists have tried to understand why people sometimes confess to crimes they didn’t commit. One reason is interrogators’ frequent use of minimization—a tactic that justifies and/or normalizes a crime, such as blaming the victim. During Melissa’s interrogation, for example, detectives described child abuse as a “mistake” that “happen[s] every single day” because kids “push [parents] to the limit.” In one well-known experiment, college students accused of cheating on a test were 3 times more likely to give a false confession if minimization was used. More recent studies have found that minimization leads suspects to expect a lesser punishment if they confess, even falsely.
It is also well-known that sleep deprivation impairs cognitive functioning and decision-making, and therefore increases the risk of false confession. In one study, participants who were interrogated after a sleepless night—similar to Melissa—were 4.5 times more likely to falsely confess to having broken a computer several days earlier, compared to others who had slept for seven hours.
The Autopsy
2 days after the interrogation, medical examiner Dr. Norma Jean Farley completed her autopsy of Mariah Lucio with a police officer present. Farley documented various injuries—including myriad bruises, bleeding inside her skull, and a weeks-old bone fracture. In light of these injuries, Farley ruled the death a homicide and later testified in no uncertain terms that “this child was severely abused.”
Importantly, however, medical opinions are subject to cognitive bias, which can lead doctors to interpret the same injuries in different ways depending on stereotypes and other factors. In various studies, medical doctors more often judged the same childhood injuries as the result of abuse (rather than an accident) if told in advance that the child’s parents were poor, drug users, or welfare recipients—all of which were true of Melissa. Stereotypes have also been shown to affect medical examiners’ opinions as to whether a child’s death was an accident or homicide. Simply put, the research suggests that Dr. Farley might have interpreted Mariah’s injuries differently if Melissa had been affluent and white.
The Conviction
In July 2008, Melissa Lucio was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The elected District Attorney at the time of her trial, Armando Villalobos, was subsequently convicted of bribery and extortion and is now serving his own prison sentence. In October 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review Melissa’s case, and unless she is granted clemency, she will soon become the first Hispanic woman to be executed in Texas. The Innocence Project has started an online petition asking Texas to review Melissa’s case.
Psychological research has shed light on why police sometimes misjudge innocent people as guilty, why innocent people sometimes confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and why stereotypes sometimes produce erroneous medical judgments. This research should raise enough doubt to give Melissa’s case a second look. For as devastating as they are, wrongful convictions can be discovered and reversed. Wrongful executions cannot.
Source: Texas Observer, Staff, February 19, 2022
Melissa Lucio could be the 1st Latina executed in Texas. Family members say her crime was a tragic accident.
Family members of Melissa Lucio, a Latina woman facing execution in Texas this April, ask Gov. Greg Abbott to stop her execution at an event Friday, Feb. 18, 2022, across the street from Harris County Criminal Justice Center in Houston.
Her mother, sisters and some of her children say there is no evidence of a murder, and it was an accident that Lucio’s 2-year-old daughter Mariah fell down a flight of rickety stairs outside their Harlingen home. But 2 daughters say Lucio abused and neglected Mariah and is responsible for her death.
Lucio, a 52-year-old mother of 14, is on death row. She is scheduled for execution April 27, and if she is put to death she would be the first Latina in Texas history to be executed, and the 1st Texas woman in nearly a decade.
Several family members spoke in Houston on Friday as part of a statewide tour to promote a 2020 Hulu documentary that makes a case that the state is on the brink of executing an innocent woman. Interviews and archival footage in the film back her post conviction lawyers’ argument that she confessed under duress, in part to shield one of her older daughters from responsibility for Mariah’s death. Evidence not presented by Lucio's defense lawyer indicated that one of the daughters told an investigator she was the one responsible, according to deleted scenes from the documentary shared with the Houston Chronicle.
At the Houston rally, a small group of Lucio’s family members, along with the documentary director and members of Death Penalty Action, gathered downtown with signs and flyers asking the public to watch the film and sign a petition requesting a stay of execution.
Lucio’s 5-year-old grandson, Elijah, was among them. He pranced around his relatives as they chanted, handing out flyers.
“My sister is innocent,” Sonya Valencia Alvarez said at the rally, her voice breaking. “This is an innocent woman. This is a loving mother of 14 children who was sent to death.”
Lucio’s lawyers say a history sexual abuse, domestic violence, poverty and drug addiction made Lucio especially vulnerable to police interrogation tactics. They believe that, like many others unversed in the legal system who spend hours in interrogation rooms, Lucio made a false confession. They say Lucio’s prosecution was hampered by unexplored evidence, corruption as well as echoes of bigotry and oppression.
The documentary, “The State of Texas vs. Melissa,” reveals harrowing details of the Cameron County mother’s struggle to raise her children while living in abject poverty, and sometimes without a home. She was sexually abused as a child by family members and later endured domestic violence. Her son recalled that she locked herself in the bathroom of their too-small apartment every day to get away from her children and get high.
Police and medical examiners said the 2-year-old’s autopsy showed severe signs of trauma and abuse due to significant bruising, a broken arm, pulled patches of hair and bite marks, according to the documentary. Experts concluded her death was due to head trauma and severe child abuse. The film director lays out evidence of how police used Lucio’s distant behavior during a lengthy interrogation — while she was pregnant with twins — to push her to reenact her alleged abuse of the 2-year-old on a doll. They used it before the jury as evidence that she was guilty of extreme abuse and neglect that led to her daughter’s death.
Lucio’s case is also awaiting consideration before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
The film, and a mountain of legal filings by the Innocence Project indicate a Texas Ranger may have coerced her confession and she was prosecuted by a district attorney under a cloud of corruption. The film also makes the case that her defense lawyer did very little to defend her.
Lucio turned down a plea offer before trial that came with a 30-year prison term, saying she was innocent. A jury convicted her of capital murder in 2008.
Lucio’s lawyers argue that exculpatory evidence the defense lawyer had in hand was not presented at her trial. They have also raised concerns that her case was prosecuted under former Cameron County District Attorney Armando Villalobos, who was later sentenced to 13 years in prison for bribery and corruption.
Her lawyers won a January 2019 federal court ruling by a three-judge appellate panel who found she was denied her constitutional right to present a complete defense at trial. The full panel of 17 judges later heard the case. Some 5th U.S. Circuit judges agreed Lucio was denied a fair trial, but the majority concluded that due to procedural technicalities, she was barred from retrial, and they upheld the execution.
The Supreme Court declined to review her petition last summer.
Officials from the Cameron County DA and Texas Attorney General’s Office did not respond to requests for comment.
While it’s clear Lucio was not a perfect mother, her family says she didn’t abuse the children and she should not be facing the death chamber for failure and neglect.
Her sister Sonya said she believes Lucio was a pawn.
“I believe Melissa was guilty to them from the 1st time she walked into the Harlingen police department,” Alvarez said. “To me this trial was staged. She didn’t stand a chance.”
Source: Houston Chronicle, Staff, February 19, 2022
Protests organized across Texas in attempt to overturn death sentence for Melissa Lucio
After years of unsuccessful appeals, Melissa Lucio, a Rio Grande Valley woman convicted of killing her 2-year-old daughter, has learned the date of her execution — April 27. Her family and friends are protesting her punishment and claim she’s innocent.
Melissa Lucio’s family and friends stood outside the Cameron County Courthouse last week and asked officials to watch the documentary, “Melissa vs. The State of Texas.”
The film alleges Lucio’s case was botched and that she is innocent. She is the only Latina in Texas history to be sentenced to death, and one of six women on death row.
The documentary renewed public interest in the case, particularly after Cameron County officials signed an execution warrant for Lucio.
Lucio’s 3rd child, John, hopes to convince county and state officials to free his mother. He scheduled the protest at the Cameron County Courthouse for the same time that officials left their offices for lunch.
“We’re just asking them to see, Luis Saenz to see, the film and see the innocence of my mother Melissa Elizabeth Lucio,” he said.
Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz ignored John Lucio and the other demonstrators as he walked past them. Saenz requested her execution warrant.
Peter Gilman, Lucio’s defense attorney — now a prosecutor in the Cameron County DA’s office — also walked past the protest, after turning around and waving them away.
John Lucio alleges that Gilman withheld evidence that could have saved his mother’s life.
“Gilman does not want to respond, because he knows what he did. He knows exactly what he did, he left out many (pieces of) evidence. And that’s why we have these signs here, ‘Watch the film,’ because inside the film, there’s a bunch of evidence that was not utilized in my mother’s trial,” he said.
On Feb. 18, Melissa Lucio’s attorneys filed motions to remove Cameron County 138th District Court Judge Gabriela Garcia and Saenz from her case. The attorneys say because 2 members of Garcia’s and Saenz’s staff previously represented Lucio’s defense they cannot prosecute her.
Gilman is one of those members, as assistant district attorney. His wife, Irma, was a paralegal in Lucio’s defense who now serves on Garcia’s court as a court administrator.
The attorneys allege Saenz and Garcia’s involvement violate Lucio’s due process rights.
Lucio plans to travel across Texas and protest his mother’s execution. Friends of the Lucio family say they will continue to hold rallies.
John is just one of Melissa's 14 children.
"She was drug abuser, yes she was. She was neglectful towards us — still does not add up to child abuse," he said at a separate protest in San Antonio's Milam Park. "She is poor, she has too many children. If she was a white male she wouldn’t be on death row today."
There was no Child Protective Services documentation of child abuse in the Lucio home.
Source: Texas Public Radio, Staff, February 19, 2022
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
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