Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 4/29/22 Jordan Smith on Melissa Lucio and the Pitfalls of Capital Punishment

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

Scott is joined by investigative journalist Jordan Smith to discuss Melissa Lucio, a Texas woman awaiting execution. Smith walks us through Lucio’s case where the tragic death of her child was immediately assumed by police and prosecutors to be foul play. Smith’s reporting has uncovered the ways Lucio was misled and manipulated into falsely incriminating herself only hours after losing her child. Lucio narrowly avoided execution last week, but she still has a long fight ahead of her to avoid being killed by the State of Texas. Smith explains where things stand for Lucio going forward.  Discussed on the show: “Melissa Lucio’s Life Was Spared At The Last Minute, What Happens Now?” (The Intercept) “How the flawed ‘science’ of bite mark analysis has sent innocent people to prison” (Washington Post) Jordan Smith is an investigative journalist based in Austin, Texas. She has covered criminal justice for 20 years and is regarded as one of the best investigative reporters in Texas. A longtime staff writer for the Austin Chronicle, she now writes for The Intercept. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: The War State and Why The Vietnam War?, by Mike Swanson; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott; EasyShip; Free Range Feeder; Thc Hemp Spot; Green Mill Supercritical; Bug-A-Salt and Listen and Think Audio. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjYu5tZiG. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show. I'm the director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of antire war.com, author of the book, Fools Aaron, time to end the war in Afghanistan, and the brand new, enough already, time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2000. almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at scothorton dot four you can sign up the podcast feed there and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scott horton show hey you guys on the line i've got jordan smit now way back when she was with the austin chronicle and now she's with the intercept of course we're all boycotting the intercept because of how horrible

they are. But you can put all of her URLs in Archive.is and read her great work anyway. And here she is with Lillianna Segura. Melissa Lucio's life was spared at the last minute. What happens now and proceeding that was as execution looms, mounting evidence points to Melissa Lucio's innocence. Welcome back to the show. Jordan, how are you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Very happy to have you here, and I've been a fan of your work for, I don't know, 20 years, 30, 25, something. Always great stuff, and it looks like you save somebody's life here. Who's Melissa Lucio?

Oh, boy. Melissa Lucio is mother from the Rio Grande Valley. First Latina on Texas's death row was slated for execution on Wednesday the 27th, and the Court of Criminal Appeals stepped in Monday afternoon to kind of, put the brakes on and send the case back to Cameron County, back to Harlingen for a sort of an evidentiary hearing based on a bunch of evidence that points to her innocence. All right. So tell me the whole damn story. Go ahead. Okay. So in 2007, Melissa Lucio was living with her partner in a kind of run-down apartment. And she had 12 kids at the

time, the youngest of which was Mariah. She was a toddler. Melissa kind of has had a really sort of tragic trauma-filled life. She'd been repeatedly sexually abused as a child, was a victim of domestic violence, was living on the margins, basically, had a drug problem. She had her children taken away by a child protective services, and this is kind of important because of neglect because of the drug use and poverty, which is not a reason to take children away, but often happens, as opposed to, you know, providing the services, just take the kids and put them in foster care. And we know how that goes in Texas. But at any rate, the kids had been taken away. She had worked on her family reunification plan and got the kids back. They were living

in this kind of dumpy apartment that, importantly, was up a very tall flight of stairs that was kind of rickety. And they were getting ready to move in February of 2007. And she was packing. some of her younger children had gone outside. Next thing she knows, Mariah is missing. She goes outside and Mariah is down, lying on the ground, had fallen down the stairs. This is not unusual for Mariah. She had a congenital sort of foot disorder that made her wobbly. And there had been times when she'd actually been in foster care and had fallen and had lost consciousness.

So she'd had traumatic brain injury before. Anyway, Melissa kind of, I think the most you could say about culpability here is that, she didn't truly appreciate sort of that the fall was bad and sort of failed to assess certain signals that Mariah's help was in decline shortly thereafter. A couple days later, as a family's moving into a new apartment, Mariah is kind of lethargic, and she is put down for a nap, and she basically never gets up again. They take her to the hospital emergency room where a sort of cascade of bias begins. Actually, it started at the apartment when the paramedics arrive.

They find a constellation of bruises on Mariah's body, and everybody decides without any investigation that this child has been horribly abused. And that sort of makes its way all down the chain. That night when they're at the hospital, the cops, of course, show up. And they decide as well that this is a case of terrible child abuse. They take Melissa in for interrogation. The night her child dies. proceed to interrogate her for more than five hours. She hasn't eaten all day. She hasn't really slept. She also happens to be pregnant with twins at the time. And they just come at her,

just come at her, come at her, come at her, and tell her they know she was abused. All the sort of classic interrogation techniques that we know for a fact lead to false confessions are on display here. Next thing, you know, she's charged with capital murder because this is a young child and is facing the death penalty. And it just sort of goes downhill from there. I mean, the cops who interrogated her, a couple of them went to the autopsy the next day. The forensic pathologist, who ends up testifying, was unequivocal about the fact that she literally took a look at Mariah and decided she was horribly abused. And you have to keep in mind, this is before she's ever done, she hasn't done any internal exam or looked at anything that's going on with this child physically.

She just decides this based on looking at her. The Texas Ranger, who was a big feature of her interrogation, similarly decided and testified to this quite proudly that he basically looked at her and decided that she had done something wrong. And so she gets put on trial. She has terrible defense counsel, naturally, as we see in these cases over and over again. And she's convicted and sentenced to death row. I think another sort of subtext that's going on here where all this sort of forensic confirmation bias is happening. And then in the background, we have the elected DA who was a man named Armando Villalobos,

who was in a re-election campaign at the time and was fighting a couple problems. Number one, he'd been charged with some serious corruption. And number two, he had an opponent who was making hay over the fact that he had not been prosecuting cases of child abuse. So all this sort of toxic brew ends up in Melissa Lucio's trial and she gets convicted. I think it's also important to note that Armando Villalobos then ends up being convicted on federal racketeering charges and is currently in federal custody. He is due to be released in 2025.

That's the DA? That's the DA who was on the case at the time. Yeah. So, you know, and people have made the point that like the cases that he handled, particularly the capital cases, are worthy of of review on their own because, you know, he, I mean, he was convicted on racketeering and bribery and kickback schemes like favors for ending criminal prosecutions in a particular way. So, you know, the case has been made that, you know, regardless of, of the status of any of those cases, particularly the capital cases prosecuted under Villalobos, deserve review, frankly just because

of the corruption that we know what's going on in that office. So, but then, you know, it's, it's kind of a shocking case, I guess for people who are not terribly familiar with Texas's death penalty, it seems sort of egregious, but it's, you know, as you well know, it's sort of par for the course. Texas's capital scheme is just sort of fatally flawed from top to bottom. So it's not terribly surprising that someone like Melissa Lucio ends up on death row. She is, you know, It is also, I think, you know, she, the, you know, subsequent to her conviction, you know, forensic pathologists and other doctors have looked at the case and say that she, everything that the family said about the fall and then the symptoms that kind of had cropped up after that, the ones that I say, you know, they kind of failed to appreciate what was really happening. They say everything that happened to Mariah is entirely consistent with the fall, as a family described. And so those are the things like that are going to be reviewed now.

But I think, you know, it's like very sobering to think that if indeed what Melissa Lucia has been saying all along, my child took a spill down the stairs and then died is true, which the experts, like, overwhelmingly agree is entirely consistent with what happened. Then the state of Texas was just about to execute a woman for a crime that never happened. Which, again, Texas has done before. Think of Cameron Todd Willingham. They said that he started a fire to kill his kids. Guess what?

It was not an arson. And we already executed Willingham. So it's not like this doesn't happen, but it's a particularly sort of egregious, you know, sort of subset of wrongful convictions where you're convicted of something that literally wasn't a crime. So that's kind of where we are at this point. Crazy. All right. There's so much here to review. First of all, well, you know, my political hero, and greatest American hero is Ron Paul. And as he puts, he's so self-deprecating. He says, this is the issue. where I've really flip-flopped and that is that he's now against the death penalty and even though as he puts it some criminals really deserve it however just look at the statistics right at how it

breaks down you just cannot trust the police the prosecutors the judges the juries to get this right and it's on the statistics is look at who gets the death penalty it's poor people and minorities. And even when you correct for crime rates and everything else, rich white people by and large don't get the death penalty for the same type of crimes. Instead, who gets it is this poor dumb Mexican lady whose IQ is probably 90 who couldn't possibly participate in her own defense in any real way, who's got some court-appointed attorney, and who's sitting there with a judge, if he's not wearing a white hood, he at least doesn't give a damn what's true or not. And And also in our adversarial system, you know, I guess the Supreme Court has ruled that the prosecutors are supposed to seek justice.

They're not supposed to just win. They're supposed to know that they're right, or at least, you know, they say the standards they have to believe they can get a conviction. But the standard should also be that they believe that they should get a conviction that the person really did it. But instead, that's really not what it is. Instead, what it is is is it's the diffusion of responsibility. Well, we'll let the jury decide, which means go out there and pretend to believe it as best you can and see if you can get it past the jury. And that's the job. It doesn't matter who the defendant is.

It doesn't matter what the accusation is. The cops brought us somebody. And I think I've told you this before, but everybody needs to hear it. Harris County, DA, assistant DA in my taxi cab 20 years ago, Harris County, that's Houston, everybody, told me that their slogan down at the DA's office. office is that if they really didn't do it, they'll get out on appeal. And what that means is that anyone the police bring them, they nail them to the wall. They do everything they can to prosecute them. They don't even wonder whether the people really did what they're accused of. That's not their job. Their job is to prosecute. And if they really didn't do it, they'll get out

on appeal, which as Jordan Smith can tell you, is actually not how criminal justice works in Texas. out on appeal if you really didn't do it. Not necessarily at all. Right. Well, and I think the point two there is like, well, first of all, you're absolutely right. You know, I mean, there's a saying that nobody pays to go to death row is a saying for a reason. And it's, you're right. It's like people with means by their way out of problems all the time. And that's why you look at the death row population. It's like minority, low income, like littered with histories of trauma and abuse, ways in which the system failed starting at the beginning, the government failed starting at the beginning, and now that here's the government coming in on the back end to clean it up in the most

sort of disgusting way, and also a system that is incredibly fallible if no for no other reason, and it's made up of people, right, like making decisions. And then to the point about the prosecutors, I mean, it's so, you know, how many times have you seen, you know, maybe they, to the point about doing justice, it's like, Like when finally a lot of these cases come back around and there's new evidence, even DNA evidence, they'll often double down. They will say, well, fine, our theory of the crime, you know, that you did it alone, we're just going to shift that now on the back end. And we're going to say, sure, maybe you didn't do it alone now. So in other words, they'll just kind of double down as a way to kind of protect that original conviction.

You know, in this case, it's kind of crazy in that, okay, it's her public defender, her appointed counsel, it's not a public defender, but her appointed counsel right after this trial goes to work for the DA, where he still works now. The judge who sat on the case is now the elected district attorney, and I hope you're sitting down, shocker of all shockers, is like completely defending this conviction. And, you know, he was actually, I have to kind of hand it to, in a way I'm not used to saying this, but I have to hand it to the Texas House of Representatives, and particularly to Jeff Leach, who was a very conservative Republican from North Texas, and then to Democratic rep Joe Moody, who's from El Paso, kind of wrangled more than half of the Texas House. I mean, think about that. They really agree on anything, really, to such decisive sort of majorities.

Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, please. Please elaborate about that. I mean, in fact, because isn't it the case that this is a matter where this particular representative, I guess, is saying, hey, hey, hey, what's right is right. And we have to do the right thing here when politically, like what we're talking about here is public choice theory, right? It's in the interest of all these political actors to do the wrong thing. Well, here's this Republican congressman who's saying, actually, I was praying on Sunday and I decided that politics be damned. We have to do the right thing here, right? Yeah, I think Jeff Leach is pretty interesting.

You know, he has, this is not necessarily, like, completely out of the blue for him a few years ago, and I'm not going to remember because I have pandemic brain to the end and don't remember years anymore. But several years ago, maybe four, five, six, he actually stood up before and said, and he's, you know, sort of an avowed supporter of capital punishment has. But he kind of, like, got himself a little bit concerned about a guy named Jeff Woods, who's also. on Texas Death Row, who was a party's case. And we've talked about that before. This is like when you're charged with capital murder for something you should have anticipated somebody else would have done, which is bonkers. But anyway, that, you know, Jeff Leach started expressing concern about Texas's law of parties,

which has been a huge concern of people involved in the criminal justice system forever. And that was the first time we kind of saw him stick his neck out on some capital punishment issues. But this time he is all in. And, you know, when he started sort of campaigning for Melissa, Lucio, So he still is saying, well, I support capital punishment. And then it kind of, you know, his language has progressed, interestingly. You know, he had a comment a few weeks ago where he said, you know, to say that I'm questioning

everything about the death penalty now is an understatement, which is a really, really interesting sort of transformation. And who knows where that'll go or if it will. But the point is that he and Joe Moody were able to sort of wrangle all these colleagues to say to Abbott and the Board of Partons and Paroles, you've got to stop this. Now, you know, it didn't come down to the Board of Partons and Parole's to stop this. And I think we could say, you know, thankfully, because it's not as though they are, I mean, they're cronies, let's face it, right?

They're put there by the governor and they generally sort of do what the governor wants. And I don't exactly, it's hard to see how all this political pressure from the majority of the Texas House. And actually, you know, majority of the senators actually came along too, which is an even more conservative body. How that might have played with Abbott, you just never know, right? It could go one way or it could go the other. But, you know, the board rarely recommends clemency. And then even rarer still does the governor actually accept those, you know, those recommendations. So it was good, I guess, that the court was the one that stepped in here. And as you well know, the court of criminal

Appeals is is problematic. They have a ton of unforced errors in their background. But I think perhaps in this case that goes in their favor, I mean, they're definitely political animals and they can read the writing on the wall. And I think that, you know, to be cynical, I think they might have stepped in here because of that, because they can see the pressure. There's this mounting sort of evidence. There's this push by these lawmakers and activists for like all over the country we were rallying. in support of Melissa Lucio, I mean, they can read that, right, and say, okay, I guess we can't even stand aside, and not that that's not in their nature, because they've let plenty of questionable convictions, you know, they've signed off and escorted them to the, you know, execution chamber

quite willingly. So, you know, there's a lot of politics happening here, but at the end of the day, we've come to the right result. I mean, it's, you know, I don't know. know what to say about that. But we are where we are and it's a good thing. Although, you know, again, this is sort of a beginning, right? So the court of criminal appeals has halted this and they have sent the case back to Cameron County to the district attorney who is the one who has like said so far that he thinks this is a good conviction and who was the one who sat on the bench and was the trial judge in 2008 to look at, they've sent it back to the court to look at four things that, you know, like I said, that there was false testimony from the pathologist

who basically, you know, decided upon viewing Mara's body without even doing anything that, you know, that she had been abused and to take into consideration sort of that false testimony in light of other scientific evidence that's far more credible. And to kind of also look at some of the junk science that was applied in this case, from the interrogation techniques to, you know, the pathologist's bizarre decision that there was a bite mark on the child's back, which nobody, you know, credible thinks is a bite mark. And they're also looking at whether some evidence favorable to Lucio was withheld and suppressed by the state at her original trial.

And then finally, to consider whether she is actually innocent of this crime. So one of the problems, of course, is that we always go back to the trial court. Now, granted, the same judge isn't sitting there, but you're still in the same venue where you were convicted the first time, and that's one of the flaws in the system, but that's where it goes. So it's still an uphill battle. I think, you know, the way my read is, I mean, the evidence is clearly on her side. If she can get a fair hearing, it seems to me that this goes favorably for her, whether the DA will then still insist, you know, on defending the conviction remains to be seen. There's a lot of if-then kind of things going on here. If this, then that, you know, it's hard to sort of figure out all of the potential kind of scenarios that play out.

But I think it's fair to say that the case will probably end up back in front of the Court of Criminal Appeals again at some point. I guess we'll just have to see. And who knows, you know, we'll see how quickly it'll play out. You know, if we know anything, if history tells us anything, this will take a while. Yeah. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, the audiobook of my book, Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, is finally done. Yes, of course, read by me. It's available at Audible, Amazon, Apple Books,

and soon on Google Play and whatever other options there are out there. It's my history of America's War on Terrorism from 1979 through today. Give it a listen and see if you agree. It's time to just come home. Enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. The audiobook. Hey guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expandesigns.com for your new business or news site.

They will take care of you. Use the promo code Scott and save $500. That's expanddesigns.com. Hey guys, Scott Horton here for Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks. As you may know, the audio book of my new book, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism is finally out. It's co-produced by our longtime friends at Listen and Think Libertarian audiobooks. For many years now, Derek Sheriff over there at Listen and Think has offered lifetime subscriptions

to anyone who donates $100 or more to the Scott Horton show at Scott Horton.org slash donate or to the Libertarian Institute at Libertarian Institute.org slash donate. And they've got a bunch of great titles, including Inside Syria by the late great Reese Erlich. That's listen and think.com. All right. Now, so I'm glad you brought up the bites and all that. Let's go back to the case here a little bit. Was there anyone else who witnessed the fall other than the mom here? Well, mom didn't see the fall. Oh, she just found her at the bottom of the stairs. She found her, yeah. She was going to look for the kids. Were there any other adults around at that time

or teenage kids or anything? There were kids around at that time and number of them and that's actually part of the suppressed documents that we're talking about here are the kids said that night at the police station

when there was an investigator from Child Protective Services that came in to talk to them and they said we saw Mariah fall. We saw Mariah fall. Mariah then started acting weird. Did you see bruises on Mariah before this?

No, I only saw bruises on Mariah after she fell. I proposed that the judge and the district attorney be sentenced to death. well i don't know uh but i will say they are they those documents were then withheld right like so there was and they played some sort of there was some trick okay i suggest they be held accountable in any conceivable way at all well i'm not fan of that for sure it doesn't happen all that

often though you know um but i the thing that's also interesting that's kind of happening in the background i mean think about that i'm sorry i'm sorry i'm a little uh i'm stuck on the last point here. Yeah. So like, let's say, for example, your mom was charged with murdering your little sister. Mm-hmm. And you saw your little sister fall. And you told the police, I saw my little sister fall.

And then the cops and the prosecutors and the judge all conspired to hide that from the jury and sentence your mother to death for murdering your little sister. Yep. What should happen to the CPS, the cops, the DA, the judge who conspired to bury that evidence? I think a hang-in is too good for them all. This woman's on death row until the day before yesterday. Yeah. They conspired to murder her.

Yeah. I will take... That's a murder plot. You got to take CPS out of that equation. They actually tried to do the right thing, but there's some... Did they show up at the truck? and say, Your Honor, we talk to the kids. We demand to testify for the defense.

Well, there's some indication that there were some threats happening from the state to, you know, via the prosecutor's office to CPS. Oh, yeah. Tell me about that. Well, I don't know all the details on that. We will certainly hear more as this goes on, and we can get into that then. I don't know. I'm not privy to all the details of that now, but there are allegations that are out there, which I think after we go back to this evidentiary hearing thing, we'll hear far more about.

You just talked me back into supporting the death penalty, but only for government employees who conspire to withhold evidence in capital crime cases, that's all. And more criminals. Very targeted. Very targeted. I will say, though, I think the other thing that's happening and that should be happening, I think today or early next week is there are two motions sitting down in Cameron County. is to recuse the DA because from, from, you know, sitting on this case at all anymore, because he's, they think, you know, their argument is he's conflicted out because Lucio's former defense

attorney is now in that office. So there's that motion pending. The second one that's pending is a motion to recuse the judge who's sitting at that court right now. Why? Because her court administrator also worked on Lucio's defense. So the claim from Lucio's lawyers is that they're both conflicted out. So the first thing that'll happen is the judge will decide. This is a little bit like, you know, cough gas. The judge will decide if the judge should recuse herself. And if she does, then another judge will be assigned to it.

Either way, after she recuses herself or does not, then whoever the judge is her or someone else will then decide whether the DA's office should be recused. I don't know, you know, to not recuse them has that sort of taint and stink on it. But again, I also could see a scenario where they're just like, yeah, no, I'm not going to recuse myself. I'm not going to recuse the DA office. Exactly. That's what's in their interest, right? Okay, now, you mentioned the bite mark there. Yeah. And this is, it sounds like a big deal, you know, in your article, way it reads is, you know, the contrast between the reality and the narrative here is as great as any war lie ever told on CNN, where you have this claim and then you have the evidence

and the, but the claim is one that leads to such an emotional type of a reaction. And you could see why the fools on the jury once fooled made the decision that they made when they came across this evidence as portrayed by the state here, right? Yeah. I mean, I've written a bunch about bite mark evidence, and just to be clear, it's complete junk. And the Innocence Project in particular has done a lot of work over the last decade to free people who were convicted solely or primarily based on bite mark evidence.

It's been a real journey to get it considered junk. And in fact, even the Court of Criminal Appeals has now concluded that bite mark evidence is junk, as has the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which... And I have to say, too, I mean, Radley Balco did this, I think, a series for the Washington Post that absolutely should have won him a Pulitzer about this. I mean, he spent, he wrote, I don't know, 100,000 words on it or something. It's just incredible. He did.

He did. He just completely took it apart from the beginning to the end. It was a great series. I think it was from, like, 2014 or 2015, it's worth checking out. But, you know, but the thing is, I mean, first of all, it is junk. It is junk. It is junk. It is junk. There is literally no scientific underpinning to it. It's all subjective guesswork. And here's where it's super problematic is that it's incredibly inflammatory. Right. It's like one expert was telling me he's like, okay, look, he's like, let's say my wife dies in our house. Well, fingerprints aren't going to be that, you know, valuable because I live there. Right. And so there's a reason for my fingerprints to be all over there. But if they find a mark on my wife, that looks like it fits my teeth, well, then, now it's me, right? And not only is it me, but look at me, I'm an animal, right? Not only do I kill my wife, but I bite her. The idea of biting is very sort of animalistic and it brings

this very inflammatory and prejudicial, right? So, you know, the guys who advocated for bite mark testimony in the 70s and as it was kind of gaining steam and in the 80s and its heyday really considered it far more valuable and, you know, inculpatory evidence than fingerprint. I mean, they prided themselves on that because what's more definitive than somebody, you know, taking a chunk out of somebody and then saying, oh, yeah, that matches your teeth, Scott. Like, it's kind of hard to defend against that and you look really sort of savage in the process. And, you know, Balco shows where some cockamamie judge had ruled that you're not allowed to challenge the evidence as presented and say, like a defense attorney is not allowed to say, oh, yeah, well, which of these five sets of false teeth. are the ones that match those marks and, like, test the skill of the guy in front of the jury. No, no, no, we have a thing already where if the bite mark science guy says so, then you have to

accept that's the science, you know, like it's some cult. Yeah, I mean, you know, in that ruling, there was an original ruling from the 70s that basically it's really important cases called, it was a California case, it's called State v. Marks. And the thing is, that's what's really interesting about it, is that, like, Like, yes, this case from the 70s opened the door to bite-mark testimony being accepted in courts all over the country. But there's another thing that it did as well is that it also sort of blessed the other, what we call pattern-matching forensics. Okay. And that's anything from fingerprints to tire treads or shoe prints to hair microscopy to...

Oh, these hairs are similar, Jordan. They're similar, I tell you. Exactly. To ballistics and to firearms analysis. All of these things are get in the door with little scrutiny based actually after this Mark's case. And it's been incredibly difficult to unring that bell. And the problem is like fingerprints are on a little bit better footing. And the people who work in that field, some of whom I know fairly well, are working really hard to like come up with error rates and figure out the ways in which they can testify. in a more sort of narrow way about the strength or relative strength of a fingerprint match. But there are a lot, you know, shoe prints, tire marks. I mean, and another one, tool marks is like huge in ballistics, right? Like these things are not being put on, on, you know, really firm scientific ground. And we should be very concerned about that.

I'm very, very skeptical when you hear, you know, this gun match, this crime. Well, now, in this case, the baby falls down the stairs. I believe you report here that you got other doctors who are saying, look, the baby's back was just scratched by the stairs on the way down the damn stairs. That's all. But then from the very beginning, at some point very near the beginning, they announced that this sick woman, as she was beating her baby to death, savagely bit her on the back like the way Bill Clinton bit Juanita Broderick on the face while he was raping her

like some savage animal. So no wonder then the jury is going, oh my God, this lady must have been going completely psycho, savagely beating her baby to death in this way. Yep. And it was all based on these claims by these government employees

who your journalism says you have other experts who say that they were just wrong about that. Is that correct? yeah oh absolutely i mean yeah there's a there's dentist who used to be a big believer in bite marks so i've known for a really long time who now basically considers it his mission to undo the damage that that dentists like him have done and you know even if you were to let's like for the sake of argument for one second let's pretend that there was like something to sort of undergird this bite mark

testimony the way in which it's applied which i unfortunately know how they do their work from years like you look at this injury and there's just like no way even applying their very sort of rudimentary subjective techniques in which you could could claim this as a bite mark right so it's like even under their own theory of things it doesn't work um and and certainly the pathologist you know was just like she testified basically that she'd been told by a dentist that it was a bite mark well no dentist ever supplied a report no dentist ever testified so it was just like this like you know sort of rudderless testimony from this pathologist that really, you know, puts this into the case in a way it should never

have gotten in there, just never should have been there. But if you look at the injury, and if you say for a minute, okay, a fall happened, yeah, when you look at it, it totally looks consistent with the idea. You know, you can't necessarily explain what that injury came from, but you can look at it in light of what the story was, right? And is that consistent? Is that a plausible explanation? It absolutely is. I think the other thing about trying to decide what happened. It's kind of important to know is that child abuse is a diagnosis of exclusion, meaning you don't just say, oh, hey, check out these bruises and stuff, child abuse. You have to go through and look at sort of what is the scenario that the family says happened or whoever was there

at the time, right? Right. And then you look at the sort of medical facts and the histology and like the actual internal examinations. And your job then is to say, what are the plausible medical explanations for these injuries? Right. That's the pilot episode of King of the Hill. You did talk to the baseball coach, right? To see whether Bobby really got hit in the head with a baseball or not? Right, right.

He did. Okay, sorry. Case closed. Exactly. So if you can say all these things are consistent, then you don't even get to child abuse, right? It's only if you can rule out all these other things as inconsistent with the evidence in front of you that you then would consider a diagnosis. of child abuse. And instead, they inverted the process here and was just like, I see bruises,

horribly abused, okay, and then the medical inquiry stops. And that's it. Hang on just one second. Hey, y'all, they've got great deals on weed at thehempspot.com. The hemp spot specializes in Delta 8 tetrahydrocanabinol instead of Delta 9, so they can send it straight to you anywhere in America. Recently, a friend moved and didn't have a guy in his new town. But then he heard about the hemp spot.com on my show and was saved, figuratively, and literally. Because if you use the promo code, Scott, you get 15% off every order, and free shipping on any order over $100. Legal jams, bud, gummies, and the rest in your state. The Hempspot.com. Spell the THC. You guys, my friend Mike Swanson has written

such a great revisionist take on the early history of the post-World War II National Security state and military industrial complex in the Truman Eisenhower in Kennedy years. It's called the war state. I have to say, it's the most convincing case I've read that Kennedy had truly decided to end the Cold War before he was killed. In any case, I know you'll love it. The War State by Mike Swanson. Some of y'all have a problem. You've got chickens, but you don't want to stand around throwing food at them all day because of all the important stuff you have to do. Well, the solution to that is to get the free range feeder from freerangefeeder.com. The free range feeder has been developed to satisfy the needs of the poultry chicken hobbyist

and the homesteader. The convertible design allows for four different mounting methods. Go to freerangefeater.com slash Scott or use promo code Scott to get 15% off. And get the free e-book. Subscribe to their newsletter to immediately receive your free copy of Getting Started with Backyard Chickens. That's freerangefeeder.com slash Scott. And now, talk, please, about this forced confession, because I know we see this all the time. You know, in the days of George W. Bush, especially, and Obama was doing it too, people would say,

torture doesn't work, but that was assuming the premise that what you want is the truth. But that's not what tortures for. Torture's for getting the answer you want. Torture does work. Sure, sure. And it could be very light as this. CIA calls it, no touch torture, not even dosing you with LSD. They can just pressure you in a way that it amounts to torture and you'll give in. Yeah, I mean, so the predominant way in which

cops have been taught to interrogate for the last, oh God, decades is something called the read technique. It really doesn't have any science underneath of it. And it's incredible, it's a guilt presumptive process. And, you know, it, it, it, it, it, just goes in assuming that you're guilty and then sort of applies these pressures across the interrogation in order to get you to admit your guilt. It's a deeply flawed process and it's what they operated on here. Every single time that Melissa tried to explain about the fall, they either just dismissed it outright or interrupted her. There's two main things that happen in these kinds of interrogations. One are called maximization strategies. And so that's like,

you know, we know that you killed her. So just tell us that you killed her and like really put the pressure on heavy that you know what happened and you now have to comply with this thing. The other flip side of it is a minimization strategy where they say, look, I mean, everybody gets frustrated with their kids, right? So everybody will understand you didn't mean to kill her. You just lost control because you were just so overwhelmed, right? So it's the idea that it's not so bad, that maybe there's some, you know, everybody can understand it. There's some underlying reason why this happened. And it cuts really close to the line of what, basically, the only thing that is illegal in these contexts, which is promising favors. I mean, that would be if I directly said, you look, Scott, you know, if you just tell me you did this, you totally, we're not going to charge you with a death penalty.

You know, you can't do that. Like, that's illegal. But the minimization strategies that cops use in these scenarios come right up to that line. arguably do that, but without literally saying the words, right? Because you can imply in all manner of ways that things will just go better for you and that it will be understood, you know, that you just lost control. Like, you were just frustrated. You have all these kids. Certainly, it doesn't, you know, it's not that unusual. And people will understand.

I mean, if that's not sort of an implied leniency, I don't know what it is. But that's kind of what they did. They ignored her at every turn and interrupted her. they, you know, she said, they said, well, do you ever spank your kids? Like, that's not illegal. And so she says, sure, yeah, I spank my kids. And then they change spanking into hitting. And then they change, you know, they keep upping the sort of, um, the severity of a spank. A spank becomes a beating, right? And so they just sort of feed her these things. And then you read the, you see the interrogation and then read the transcript. And it's like she's just regurgitating back

to them what they're saying to her, which is, of course, another huge red flag. when you're talking about confessions. The other thing that they did, which a lot of cops will do, which is just, is they will share with you evidence, right? So, or give you something that only a perpetrator would know in a case where we know there's a crime, right? And is it fair to say here, Jordan, too, that she's too ignorant to know, to understand what it means that she can have a lawyer here.

She needs a lawyer here to help her talk to these people, that her life is on the line and all these things. Like, this is a pretty poor and disadvantaged person. I agree. I agree that she is. And I, from seeing the interrogation and reading it, I am, I have very deep reservations and concerns about whether she understood her Miranda rights as they were given to her. I don't think that she fully appreciated what was going on.

But you have to understand also that, like, this is a woman who is naturally reeling from the death of her child at this moment. Yeah, just a couple hours ago or whatever, right? So she's probably out of her mind anyway, yeah. She's got this fresh trauma that's happening right now as these cops are coming out her. But she also has a lot of abuse in her history, and that actually, you know, kind of can trigger, right, when you're in those kinds of environments, can trigger responses, acquiescing.

I mean, you know, people who have been abused, like it's not uncommon to acquiesce to this sort of stern and abusive behavior. So she had a lot of disadvantages. And frankly, what we know are risk factors for false confessions. And frankly, like, you know, if your kid falls down the stairs on your watch, then that's kind of your fault. And that's maybe entirely your fault. And she probably felt really guilty about that, too.

They're like, God, geez, I mean, you know, what am I going to do? You guys put it this way. I put it that way. But like, yeah, I did. Just going to do it, you know, in a way. You're totally right. And I think that's also what's, like, I'm glad you brought that up because what's kind of really interesting about this is this interrogation does not lead to a confession in the way that most people would think of it. In fact, Melissa Lucio, across, I mean, her interrogation, she's at the hospital like seven something that night. Her actual interrogation doesn't begin until 10 p.m. and they keep her until after three in the morning. And yet, during all this time, when they ask her if she killed her child, she is. adamant that she did not and says she does not know what happened. But the way in which this is a confession is she basically starts to acquiesce and they show her photos. This is the other

technique that's bad. It's going back to sharing evidence basically, right? They start showing her photos of Mariah's body, which is very bruised and there's reason for that, like a normal medical reason for that. But they start showing her these things and she's like reeling and they're saying, well, tell us how this mark happened. Tell us how this mark happens. So she's like, I guess I hit her. And that's where the bite thing comes up to. Like, tell us about this bite mark. Well, I guess I bid her. So there is false confessing happening in here where she's taking responsibility for things that like literally, um, we're part of the medical condition. Like, you know, we're things that were consequent to the fall, right? And, and not child abuse. There's literally no history of abuse, um, of any of her children in their entire, history, and that's, you know, with CPS on your back, you'd think they'd know, right? Well, and her kids are all 10 years older now, 13, 14 years older now, so they can help tell that story, you know, much better in their own words now, right? Sure, yeah. I mean, and her kids wrote very forcefully as part of her clemency package

that, you know, that they know that their mother didn't do anything wrong, and that executing her would only re-traumatize them. They'd lose not only their sister, but they will lose their mom to something that was an accident. I mean, it's pretty potent stuff. I don't know, Jordan. Finality is very important. If people can just second-guess judge's decisions all the time, why the whole damn system might unravel. Isn't that exactly what a federal appeals court had ruled before? Well, yeah, the... Finality, Uber-A-Lis? Yeah, finality is a problem. I mean, the notion of finality, the idea that the wheels will come up. off the bus, though, if we revisit questionable convictions, I think it's just bullshit, to be

frank. Like, it's just, you know, I don't. I know people have. It's a good place to start, you know? I know that people have this, like, notion that everybody in prison claims they didn't do it. In my experience, it's absolutely not true. The cases where people are adamant that they didn't do something are not all that common and should be paid attention to.

And there's real easy ways to sort of sort through claims you think are legit and not. So the notion that we have to have this finality, less like everybody and their mother will suddenly, you know, be like claiming they're innocent. I just, you know, in my experience, that's just not the case. And also, you know, to an extent it's like, I mean, I feel like obviously that would be sort of unwieldy. And I don't think that would happen. But at the same time, the system is supposedly designed so that a guilty person is better to have a guilty person free than an innocent. one convicted and I truly think that's the case. Like, we have killed innocent people. I know, and you know, you brought up Willingham before and that is an important one. People might not

remember. It's been a little while now, but there was a house fire and his daughters died and they just BSed all this stuff about, you know, the pattern of the fire and blamed it on him. And they executed the guy. And I don't remember anymore the name of the thing, but there was a Kevin Spacey movie where essentially he framed himself. for murdering his wife and tricked the government into prosecuting him and executing him and then only the evidence comes out

I'm spoiling the movie the evidence comes out of the end that he didn't really do it she just died and then he framed himself just to prove that here you can no longer deny it it's a fact now the state of Texas executed an innocent guy

and then that was supposed to be like wow now come up and right now accountability now the whole damn system has to screech to a hall and we have to figure out something else to do right that was the premise of that film was that if that ever happened if it was ever proven that they executed an innocent person or say came this close like they did the day before yesterday um to executing this innocent woman here that that should mean everybody stop what are we doing how can we let government that you wouldn't trust to educate you wouldn't trust to educate

your kid. How would you let them decide who to kill or not? Yeah. Seriously. Yeah. We agree there, for sure. I mean, yeah. And, you know, we've done that there are, there's, you know,

Willingham, which nobody thinks. Now, I can't think of anybody credible, who thinks that the fire at Willingham's house was arson. The science reveals that it wasn't, so we kind of tend to trust the science. And, you know, and we've killed, we have at least another one on our hands that, I mean, Williamham is like more like Lucio in that it's a no crime case, right? Like, you know, which is deeply, deeply disturbing. Just to clarify, you mean, where there actually wasn't even a crime at all, it was just a thing that happened and then the government twisted it into a thing, as opposed to somebody who clearly

was murdered, but they just blamed it on the wrong guy or that kind of. anything. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Like Willingham's case, Lucio's case, no crime case. They're like a subset. And I'm saying you got another one like this going on in Texas now? No. No, no, no, no. Oh, I misunderstood. Lord. Yeah, no. But I mean, you know, that's a, it's a subset of wrongful convictions and they should be, they should give everybody very, very big pause, right? Like, yeah. That is, it's not just getting the wrong person for a murder, which of course is egregious in itself, but it's literally prosecuting something for something that didn't happen, right? And this is hard for people, Jordan, as you know, and especially in specializing in crime

as you do, that there are some criminals who absolutely have sacrificed their own right to continue being alive and where you could figure that if not the kin of the victim, but that somehow society at large has a right to put this dog down for some of the things that people do to innocent people. I mean, I don't need to get into details. Everybody knows how bad some crimes can be but the problem is this is our security force and they just cannot be trusted to get it right you can and we see them constantly you see innocent people released from prison after decades but if they're still alive they can be released if they hadn't died in the meantime in prison but once you execute them that's way too late to ever correct it and just seems like

it's just too big uh you know what just lock them in prison and we'll have to settle for that, you know, because it's just, you know, again, I'll make exceptions for judges and prosecutors and war criminals. But even then, you know, like, if a prosecutor prosecuted another prosecutor, you would know that this is corruption. This isn't justice. This is just some faction taking revenge with state power in a corrupt way anyway, right? There's just, you got to throw away this power. There's no way to allow these people to have this authority, you know? It's crazy. I totally agree. I'm just rant and raven all over your interview.

But I mean, look at this case. This is insane. You know, I pulled up your story this morning, and I saw the headline, was race to save her by the 27th. And I went, oh, my God, the 27th was two days ago. So I put her name in the thing to see if they had murdered her or not. And then, thank God, I found that, no, she had been saved at the last minute. Your article may well have tipped the balance here. I mean, just think about that.

If it wasn't Jordan Smith writing about this, we might be on the other side of the line right now, and this lady be dead. That ain't fair. What the hell kind of system is that? I think you have a really good point there, which I think that, you know, there's a woman from France who did a documentary about Melissa's case a few years ago. It's called the State of Texas versus Melissa. And then she made a really good point the other day, which we included in the most recent story that we did. is that, you know, the state in order to do what it's going to do and put someone like Melissa to death sort of depends on the anonymity of these cases and nobody looking too closely.

And I think this woman, her name is Sabrina Van Tassel, I think she was absolutely right. And what she was saying is that the state wanted to do this and they wanted to do it without anybody looking or knowing who Melissa was. And she really wanted people to know who Melissa was. She did the movie, and then Lillianna and I started actually writing stories about it. I think we were the first national outlet to do so. And then suddenly, you know, it's like everybody kind of knows who Melissa was. And that kind of goes back to the point I was making before, which is like the Court of Criminal Appeals, did they step in out of the goodness of their own heart?

I don't think so, right? So it's like it takes people raising the profile of these things. If nobody had really questioned this stuff, the lawyers could have written one wonderful briefs making all these claims. And I think you could see a scenario where they make wonderful arguments and the court just dismisses them, right? And just it's like, well, we've ruled on this case before. So I don't see any problem here.

It's kind of scary that it takes the sort of media attention and activists' attention to raise the profile so that the state just can't walk, you know, sort of dark in the dark and just sort of put people to death, claiming that they're doing the right thing. which is, you know, how they roll. Well, that's why you're my hero. I mean, look at the great example that you set. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls out there, it doesn't get done unless somebody does it. You got to do the work or the lady gets executed.

And Jordan Smith is proof of that. She gets up in the morning, does the work, and then the lady's still alive. See how that is? Somebody's got to step in. Maybe that's you. You know? That's what I think. thank you jordan

thank you everybody that's jordan smith she used to be at the austin chronicle but now she's at the intercept but just put the link in archive i s because we're boycotting the intercept i like trevor arinson still as execution looms

mounting evidence points to melissa lucio's innocence it's uh co-written also with lilliana sagura as well thank you so much jordan again thank you thank you so much the scott horton show anti-war radio can be heard on kate APFK 90.7 FM in LA.

APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, Scott Horton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.