by Chuck Sharman

After more than two decades of wrongful incarceration, Texas state prisoner Carmen Mejia, 54, was exonerated and released from the Travis County Correctional Complex by the state Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) on March 11, 2026. Two days earlier, Travis County District Court Judge P. David Wahlberg dismissed Meija’s 2003 murder charge. But she was not released until a detainer order from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was lifted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE’s parent agency.

The process was set in motion by a ruling from the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, granting Mejia a writ of habeas corpus and declaring her “actually innocent” in the July 2003 death of 10-month-old Abelardo Casiano. Mejia was babysitting him when she took time to feed one of her own four small children, and the others snuck the infant into the bathtub and turned on the hot water. The water heater in Mejia’s rental trailer, lacking a modern temperature regulator, sent scalding hot water gushing over the baby, who suffered burns that proved fatal hours later, after Mejia scrounged for money from neighbors to pay cab fare to an Austin hospital.

Fearful of implicating her children in the death, Mejia told hospital personnel the same story that she told her husband, who was at work when the accident occurred: that the baby had pulled a pot of boiling water onto himself off the stove. A skeptical social worker alerted Austin Police officers, to whom Mejia then told a series of shifting stories—that the tub must have filled from a leaky hot water valve before the infant crawled into it; that the baby’s father was abusive and had raped her, and when she refused to have sex with him again, he hurt the child. Only after these gambits failed did she admit the truth and implicate her own kids.

Travis County investigators then obtained Mejia’s statement of events along with corroborating statements from her children in videotaped interviews. However, the tapes were “lost” by the time her trial rolled around two years later. The only expert testimony jurors heard was: (1) that the most likely explanation for Casiano’s fatal injuries was an adult held him under the scalding water; and (2) that the child might have survived with more prompt medical care. Mejia was convicted of felony murder, injury to a child, and injury to a child by omission, and she was sentenced to three terms of life imprisonment. The conviction was affirmed by Third District of the state Court of Appeals in 2008.

Attorneys with the Innocence Project got wind of the case in 2021 and presented it to a burn expert, who challenged the prosecution’s theory of the case and said that it was plausible the child died the way Mejia said that he did. Based on that new evidence, the Conviction Integrity Unit of Travis County District Attorney José Garza (D) agreed to investigate. Mejia’s children were found, but they had little memory of their mom, having been adopted by other families after her incarceration. However, one of them remembered putting Casiano in the bathtub and turning on the hot water. When confronted with that admission, all three experts who testified at Mejia’s trial—including the medical examiner—changed their opinion and allowed that the death was not necessarily the result of an intentional act.

A habeas petition was filed, which the Travis County District Court granted in July 2024, agreeing with all four arguments put forth by Innocence Project counsel: that false or misleading testimony from the prosecution experts had tainted the conviction; that newly available scientific evidence from the burn expert entitled Mejia to relief under Texas Code of Criminal Procedure Article 11.073; that this newly discovered evidence established her “actual innocence” of the charges; and that trial counsel had been ineffective in failing to uncover it. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals agreed in its ruling on January 26, 2026, affirming the trial court’s finding that Mejia was “actually innocent” of all three counts charged against her. See: Ex parte Mejia, 2026 Tex. Crim. App. Unpub. LEXIS 31 (Crim. App.).

That set up the trial court’s order for Mejia’s release. But the TDCJ had a detainer order from ICE for Mejia, whose murder conviction had voided the Temporary Protected Status granted when she first arrived from Honduras in 1995. The following day, the DHS lifted the detainer, saying that the exoneration entitled Mejia “to remain in the U.S. until her Temporary Protected status expires.”

Under Texas Code § 103 and § 501, the declaration of actual innocence entitles Mejia to $80,000 in compensation for each year of her wrongful incarceration—a total near $1.68 million. She may also receive tuition for up to 120 hours at a career center or public higher education institution, and she qualifies for reentry and reintegration services, as well as the opportunity to buy into the state Employee Health Plan.  

Additional sources: KVUE, New York Times

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login