Gatesville.- The family and friends of Latina Melissa Lucio celebrated the decision on Monday from the Texas Court of Appeals to stop his executionscheduled for this Wednesday, with a relaxed dinner that took place near the prison where the accused is still imprisoned.
Among the attendees were two of the sons who have made the greatest efforts to promote the campaign in favor of their mother, John Lucio and Bobby Álvarez, together with the French-American filmmaker Sabrina Van Tassel, responsible for the documentary that exposed the long list of irregularities that occurred during Melissa Lucio’s trial.
Sharing a table with them was the founder of the Death Penalty Action organization, Abraham Bonowitz, and John Lucio’s wife, Michelle Lucio, thanks to whom, Van Tassel told Efe, the fight for Melissa’s rights began.
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“She was the first I came into contact with. The only one who initially paid me some attention,” said the person in charge of the documentary “The State of Texas vs. Melissa.”
Total, about thirty people, all of them dressed in a black T-shirt with the message “Free Melissa Lucio”, gathered at the Junction on Route 36 restaurantwhere the relaxed atmosphere of the establishment, full of decorative elements with a Texan flavor, coincided with the mood of the guests.
It was not for less, since the joint work of all of them led, when there were just over 48 hours left for the execution, in a judicial decision that could lead to a new trial for Lucio, accused of killing his daughter of two years of a beating, although she has always alleged that the little girl, Mariah, fell down the steep access stairs of her residence at the time.
The family hopes, in fact, that another trial will not be held, but that the charges against Melissa will be dropped directly and that this mother of 14 children will be able to return home after 15 years of absence, after she was arrested in February 2007, hours after the girl’s death.
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Melissa Lucio is the first Latina sentenced to death in Texasand had the execution been carried out, she would have become the first woman to receive the death penalty in the state since 2014.
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