More Doubts Raised About Carmen Mejia’s Murder Conviction

The Travis County Justice Complex (photo by Lauren Johnson)

Art Guerrero had served as a bailiff in dozens of criminal trials in Travis County by the time he worked the Carmen Mejia murder trial in 2005. Observing those cases – DWIs, robberies, assaults – he never second-guessed a jury’s verdict.

But Mejia’s trial was different, Guerrero told the Chronicle. From the moment it began, he worried that Mejia wasn’t receiving proper legal representation. He wondered if the death of the 10-month-old infant at the center of the case had been, as Mejia claimed, an accident. He still remembers the moment he was sure.

“Ms. Mejia cried through the whole trial,” Guerrero recalled. “She never raised her head. After she was found guilty, they had the part of the trial where the family member can speak and the baby’s father went up and asked her, 'Why did you do this?’ Ms. Mejia raised her head up – it was the first time I saw her face. And she looked eyeball to eyeball with him. And she told him, 'I did not do this.’ That’s when I felt it. This lady is telling the truth.”

Mejia, a Honduran immigrant who spoke no English, was accused in 2003 of submerging a child she was babysitting in scalding bathwater while looking after him and four of her own kids. She claimed the scalding was an accident, that one of her daughters, about 5 years old at the time, had placed the baby in the tub and turned on the hot water while she was out of the room. Prosecutors presented three experts at her 2005 trial who testified that the burn patterns on the baby’s body proved it had been forcibly submerged. Mejia was found guilty, and her children were adopted by another family.

Vanessa Potkin of the Innocence Project is coordinating with the Travis County District Attorney’s Office to try to free Mejia or get her a new trial. She confirmed that one of Mejia’s daughters testified at a hearing last fall that it was she who turned on the hot water. “It was really powerful to hear her account of what happened, that this was a tragic accident,” Potkin said. “It was a tragic accident that had consequences for so many people. And for Carmen Mejia that meant that she spent the past two decades in prison for a crime that she didn’t do.”

Potkin joined prosecutors from the D.A.’s Office in December to present affidavits from the three experts who testified at Mejia’s trial, saying they can no longer claim that the child’s burns were caused intentionally. At a hearing on Jan. 23 of this year, Potkin’s co-counsel, Tim Gumkowski, questioned Edward Carmona, the court-appointed attorney who defended Mejia in 2005, asking why Carmona did not provide his own expert at trial to challenge the testimony of the state’s experts. Carmona replied that he had hired an expert but decided not to use him after realizing he had no experience with burn injuries. He said he asked for more money for another investigator but was denied. Gumkowski pointed out there is no mention in the court record of his request for more money.

Gumkowski also asked Carmona about the difficulties he had in gathering information from his investigator in the case and noted that he didn’t make a motion to delay the trial to provide more time to gather that evidence. His point was clear: the state had three experts to make their case while Mejia had none, and Carmona found little corroborating evidence to support her claim.

Art Guerrero sat in the back row of the courtroom during Gumkowski’s questioning. He told us afterward that he has worried about these issues since Mejia’s conviction but was afraid to speak out while he was still a bailiff, concerned it would affect his employment. When he retired, he contacted the Innocence Project but didn’t immediately hear back from them. In 2021, he shared his worries with his old boss, retired Judge Charlie Baird, who discussed them with the then-recently elected district attorney, José Garza. Garza met with Guerrero and heard his story.

“The doors began to open,” Guerrero said. “But I want to say that if it hadn’t been for Mr. Garza it wouldn’t have happened. I would still be thinking, 'How can I help?’”

At the conclusion of the hearing, visiting Judge David Wahlberg told the court he has received over a thousand pages of testimony to go through and set the next hearing for Feb. 13. He expects to make a recommendation on the case sometime in the next six months.