“Conscience is the only voice that protects the life of an innocent man,” he wrote in a journal entry in 1981, when he was still lucid. “The voice of conscience echoing ever louder and higher for as long as the agonizing nights last.”

Lucio was convicted of the 2007 killing of her 2-year-old daughter Mariah in Harlingen, a community of around 71,000 people on

A Texas judge says that a mother who was previously convicted in 2008 of capital murder in the February 2007 death of her 2-year-old daughter is 'actually innocent,' as Texas’s Court of Criminal Appeals can now decide on her release.

Melissa Lucio was two days away from being put to death in Texas for the murder of her 2-year-old daughter when an appeals court intervened in 2022. Now, a judge says Lucio never committed the crime at all.

Lucio has long maintained she is innocent and her daughter Mariah died of a head injury sustained in an accidental fall down a steep staircase two days before her death