The Case of Melissa Lucio

Melissa Lucio is set to be executed in less than 90 days. And there is hopefully forming and will continue to form enough of a groundswell of support for her. She's been on death row more than a decade, I think close to 15 years. And she's accused of killing her child. And I want to preface the story of Melissa Lucio by saying, if you're inspired by anything I say and you want to do anything, if you just Google Melissa Lucio and it's L-U-C-I-O and Innocence Project, right on the landing page of the Innocence Project, you will get to information about how you can support right now. But here is someone, and this goes back to rebuilding communities and why this is so important, right? This is someone that was born into awful circumstances, history of sexual abuse that started when she was six years old and finds herself being interrogated by the police. And why I reference why it's so important to building communities, not that that's going to cure all instances of sexual abuse, but oftentimes sexual abuse happens in lower socioeconomic depressed areas where there isn't the social emotional intelligence that people, it's proliferated through generations. It's not always, but she was born into awful circumstances and not very well off and she's at the hands of this terrible abuse. Why I tell that story is with stronger communities. I think we get less instances of that and many other things. But the reason why I raise that is because someone that has had past trauma like that is way more susceptible to being broken down during an interrogation because they have a certain vulnerability to them. So she is the mother of 12 and is pregnant with twins and is accused of killing her child. There's no physical evidence of any abuse whatsoever and she's interrogated over and over again. You can watch clips of the interrogation online and the culmination of this five hour interrogation was I guess I did it. You really have to invest in just understanding why people confessed to crimes they didn't commit. This is not an uncommon phenomenon. A lot of wrongful incarceration cases start with a false confession. And the false confession is hard for people to understand because the reaction that it invokes in folks is that I would never confess to a crime I didn't commit. I don't care what you do to me. I don't care what pressure you put on me. It's just A not true and B you have no idea what it's like unless you have been through it. And the best example is a starting place that I can give and we'll get back to Melissa in a minute. And I'd like everybody to think about and really sit through this emotion. You're driving in your car and you hear the sirens and see the lights go on. Think about what that feels like. For most people it's a rush of adrenaline. It's a raise in your blood pressure and it's the release of hormones that you probably know the names of and I don't. Even if you weren't speeding didn't run the stops on whatever it is for a minor traffic violation. So start there. When you were having an interaction with law enforcement it is a stress inducing event even if it's because you're being pulled over for speeding. There is no one among us that will deny that. Now try to put yourself in a windowless room where on the day of losing your child or in the weeks or months following losing your child you are being accused of doing that. And try to wrap your head around the grief and the depth of the pain, the spectrum of emotions that comes along with trying to cope with that and add that to your already existing vulnerabilities. The psychology that goes into that is very complex and very well documented and well studied. There's a professor at John Jay College in New York named Saul Cassin who has done some of the most famous experiments about this. You can read about why people falsely confess. There's tons of great stuff to read about it. She was one of the most vulnerable candidates for it. And she finally said, I guess I did it. And the way you determine whether or not somebody is falsely confessing to something is you start to match the physical characteristics of the crime to what they say they did. And if you're not seeing that they match up, it's a strong indication of a false confession. Another example that most people can latch onto is Brendan Dassey, who my dear friend Laura Nyreider, who was in Making a Murderer and runs this really amazing social justice organization for the Wrongfully Incarcerated up at Northwestern and is handling his case. Brendan Dassey, he was Stephen Avery's nephew in the Making the Murderer. The things that they were getting him to say, he was saying, okay, I did X, but really Y happened. They'd say, no, say Y happened. So you start to match the disparity between what they're confessing to. And what happens to Melissa Lucio is something similar. They're trying to supply her with details. They're trying to force her to say things. She doesn't know the answers. She's dealing with the enormity of the death of her child. She's pregnant. And she finally says, I guess I did it. What are they accusing her? Killing her child. Of how? I think it was manual strangulation. You can read about the case on the Innocence Project. Do they know what the kid actually died from? They know now and her experts show that it was not ... I don't want to speak about the case in details without giving people a chance to read the details and decide from themselves. Because getting behind something is not something you should do because somebody says it on a podcast. I encourage people to do their own research. And frankly, I don't know enough about the details of the nooks and crannies of the case, but I know enough to know that the people that I'm close with that are working on her case have done the amount of due diligence that I would do in way more. And what I do know is that they had CP, Child Protective Services records to go through that didn't document a single instance of physical violence toward kids. And as a starting point, the statistic on this is staggering. 70% of women that were exonerated are exonerated for crimes that never happened. So let me say that again. Of the women that have been exonerated in the United States for crimes they did not commit are exonerated of crimes that never actually occurred. They either turn out to be accidents, suicides, or no crime happened at all. So that's the starting point. I just think that if you go and read about her case and if you were ever like, I want to do something right now, that is something that the governor's name here is Governor Abbott, I believe. And a lot of people lose hope. But when it came to Rodney Reed and others, things happen. And when there's a groundswell of support, things can happen. And before we go taking the life of a mother of 14 kids, she had to deliver her twins from in jail from death row. We better be really sure. And she's been in jail for how long? 14 years on death row. And before we go, if we have any pause, any pause at all, we stop. It's interesting. So go to the, if you Google Innocence Project and Melissa Lucio, L-U-C-I-O, there is a very specific way that you can sign on to a petition and a very specific way you can contribute and learn about her case. And I deal with this often. And this is more of a question for you because I don't know the answer and it's a riddle I've been trying to solve for more than 20 years. We like to think of ourselves as impartial. So whenever I'm an alleged expert in jury selection, that was like my initial claim to fame. I wrote a book with a federal judge called The Law of Juris. And that was like the sexiest part of what I did. I was the jury expert. And when you're picking a jury, you're not really picking a jury, you're deselecting people because you don't have the ability to say, I want Joe and Jamie and Mary and Cindy. You have the ability to say, I don't want Joe and I don't want Mary and I don't want Jamie. So it's really deselecting. And the psychology behind that is let me get rid of the people that I think are not, in a criminal case for instance, are not going to presume my client innocent. In the great fallacy of our system of justice, perhaps the biggest fallacy is this notion that we presume people innocent until proven guilty. It's something we like to say and it's something that we like to trot out there as what makes us different from the rest of the world. And we say we're the only system of justice. It's just not true. If we're honest with ourselves, the first thing you think about when someone has been accused of a crime is that they must have done it. And now I don't accept my own opinion on it. My firm, there are tons of independent studies on it. I had my firm conduct a study on it with thousands of participants and close to 90% of people polled when they respond anonymously, say, if I hear someone is accused of a crime, I assume they are guilty. All right? So there is no presumption of innocence. So my question is, there have been decades and decades of lawyers far more gifted than I'll ever be that have tried to crack this code. And I can encourage you to serve on juries and not look for ways out. I can encourage you that when you stare at the person sitting in that seat at the table, you look at an innocent person and say, that is an innocent man or woman. And there are all sorts of tricks and devices of persuasion, the great criminal defense lawyers from Clarence Darrow to Ted Wells to Roy Black and Barry Scheck and every great Jerry Sharke, Jerry Lefkort, Lisa Wayne, the best criminal defense lawyers I know have tried. You are shrouded in a blanket of innocence and that that shroud does not fall from your shoulder, not a bit unless and until the government can tear it away from you. And when you go back into that room to deliberate, you should walk through that door saying we are dealing with an innocent man or woman unless and unless and until the government can meet its burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt. But these are just words. And the problem that we have is that if you look at the rate of conviction and most federal jurisdictions across the country, it's over 98%. And that can't be. It just can't be. So my question to you is, and I don't know that you know the answer or I invite people to sort of what it how do you impress this notion of the presumption of innocence.