A JUROR in the Melissa Lucio case has said they were “wrong” to sentence the mum to death for her daughter’s wedding.
It comes after Kim Kardashian this week urged Texas Governor Greg Abbott to spare her life.
Lucio, a 53-year-old Mexican-American mum, was found guilty in 2008 of the death of her two-year-old daughter Mariah, who died in 2007 after falling down the stairs.
Sentenced to the death penalty, her execution is scheduled for April 27 at the Huntsville Penitentiary.
As the deadline nears, her attorneys have asked the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and Republican Governor Greg Abbott, to commute her sentence or delay her execution for 120 days.
The additional time, the lawyers say, would allow them to present "crucial" facts which will back their call for a new trial.
During hours of relentless questioning, Melissa Lucio more than 100 times had denied fatally beating her 2-year-old daughter.
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But worn down from a lifetime of abuse and the grief of losing her daughter Mariah, her lawyers say she acquiesced to investigators.
“I guess I did it”, Lucio responded when asked if she was responsible for some of Mariah's injuries.
Her lawyers say that statement was wrongly interpreted by prosecutors as a murder confession tainting the rest of the investigation into Mariah’s death.
Now one of the jurors who sentenced her to death has written a newspaper editorial claiming he was misled and pressured during her trial.
Johnny Galvan Jr wrote in The Houston Chronicle that he had succumbed to “peer pressure” when making his decision.
He changed his vote from a life sentence to the death penalty because they’d "be there all day" if he didn’t.
It comes after Kim Kardashian urged Gov Abbott to grant Lucio clemency after she “falsely pleaded guilty”.
She said: “It's stories like Melissa's that make me speak so loud about the death penalty in general and why it should be banned when innocent people are suffering.
The Texas Attorney General's Office maintains evidence shows Mariah suffered the “absolute worst” case of child abuse her emergency room doctor had seen in 30 years.
Lucio, 53, would be the first Latina executed by Texas and the first woman since 2014.
Only 17 women have been executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court lifted its ban on the death penalty in 1976, most recently in January 2021.
In their clemency petition, Lucio's lawyers say that while she had used drugs, leading her to temporarily lose custody of her children, she was a loving mother who worked to remain drug-free and provide for her family.
Lucio has 14 children and was pregnant with the youngest two when Mariah died.
Lucio and her children struggled through poverty. At times, they were homeless and relied on food banks for meals, according to the petition.
Child Protective Services was present in the family's life, but there was never an accusation of abuse by any of her children, Potkin said.
Lucio had been sexually assaulted multiple times, starting at age 6, and had been physically and emotionally abused by two husbands. Her lawyers say this lifelong trauma made her susceptible to giving a false confession.
In the 2020 documentary The State of Texas vs. Melissa, Lucio said investigators kept pushing her to say she had hurt Mariah.
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