While the numbers are still high, women are far less likely to wind up on death row, or be executed, than men.įemale inmates make up just 2 percent of the total death row population with 2,541 men currently awaiting execution, according to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Lucio is just one of 51 women currently on death row across America.Īll are awaiting state executions after the last woman on federal death row – Lisa Montgomery – was put to death in January, during Donald Trump’s last week in office. The Supreme Court had been the last hope left for Lucio after exhausting all her legal appeals over the last 13 years. “As a result, a battered woman is facing execution for a crime she did not commit.”
“Melissa Lucio’s case is an example of how the US legal system continues to ignore the consequences of gender-based violence in sentencing women to death,” Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide and consultant to Lucio’s legal team, tells The Independent.
On 18 October, the US Supreme Court denied a petition to hear Lucio’s case, paving the way for the state of Texas to begin a countdown of as few as 91 days before she dies.Īt the centre of Lucio’s fight for her life has been the lack of conclusive evidence that a murder was even committed, with discrepancies in whether Mariah’s fatal head injury was caused by an individual or by a fall down the stairs.Īdditionally, two key witnesses for the defence were blocked from testifying at her trial that she gave a false confession, relenting to the will of a male officer following a lifetime of abuse at the hands of men. Now, aged 53, Lucio could be given her execution date any day now following a decision by America’s highest court last week. By the age of 26, she was a single mother to five children and addicted to cocaine.Īnother abusive relationship, seven more children and homelessness followed, before – at the age of 40 – Lucio became the first Hispanic woman sentenced to death in Texas for the murder of her two-year-old daughter Mariah.
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