"The State of Texas against Melissa": a counter-investigation on death row in the United States

Melissa Elizabeth Lucio, a 50-year-old of Latin American origin sentenced to death for the infanticide of her 2-year-old daughter, has been languishing in the prison of Gatesville, Texas, for eleven years, waiting for the implementation of this decision, which will occur after the defense appeals. Franco-American director, Sabrina Van Tassel brings with this documentary a reasonable doubt on the guilt of this mother. However, the film does not start very well for Melissa. We see relatively damning police interrogations for her, we learn that this woman living in poverty, mother of fourteen children, was subject to a severe addiction to drugs. We hear witnesses, sometimes very close, who do not seem to exempt her from the bundle of suspicions that weighs on her.

There would be reason, a posteriori, to resent the director for giving her main character such an image, when we discover that the project of her film is diametrically opposed to the impression that it begins by creating. One imagines, however, that a dramaturgical desire led the director to this staging. To show, first of all, the very appearances on which justice was based in the place of the suspect to condemn her, to better dismantle, secondly, one by one the convictions which guided this sentence.

Because it is indeed to demonstrate the fragility of the accusation and the consequent need for questioning that this documentary works, which results from a real work of investigation. A bundle of testimonies collected by the director makes, in fact, the decision of the Texan justice hasty, if not to say, following the film, which does not hesitate to open this perspective, suspect of racist and social prejudices.

Miscellaneous sources

These arguments are all the more convincing when they come from various sources. That of the family, of course, most of whose members, first and foremost Melissa's children, recall the kindness and level-headedness of their mother. That of the defendant's lawyer, who demonstrates how the procedure was oriented and recalls that on the day of the death of the child, his mother never found herself alone with her.

Still other words, confusing because emanating from people outside the immediate environment. That of the medical examiner who invalidates the conclusions of his predecessors on the cause of death. That of the expert psychologist who rules out that Melissa's profile is that of an infanticide. Or, conversely, the damning testimony, steeped in a suspect ideology, of Melissa's first court-appointed lawyer, who advised her to confess guilt that she denies and who knowingly blocked the demonstration of a evidence that exculpated his client.

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