Judge David Wahlberg’s voice was low, almost inaudible, as he summed up the new findings in the Carmen Mejia case. Wahlberg began by recognizing that the jury in Mejia’s 2005 murder trial did not have the evidence necessary to return a just verdict. He noted that the most important piece of unheard evidence had been “locked in the brain of a 3-year-old.” He recalled the moment when that 3-year-old – Mejia’s daughter, now 24 – presented the evidence for the first time in October of last year, calling the testimony “extremely credible.”
That daughter and two of her siblings, seated in the gallery behind their birth mother, wept as Wahlberg concluded his remarks. “Having heard all the evidence from the testimony, it’s my opinion that this was a wrongful conviction,” the judge said. “That’s going to be my recommendation to the Court of Criminal Appeals – that Ms. Mejia be found innocent.”
Wahlberg’s Aug. 14 decision came at the end of the latest in a series of hearings reconsidering the murder conviction of Mejia, a Honduran immigrant accused in 2003 of killing a 10-month-old baby by submerging him in scalding bathwater. After her arrest, police subjected Mejia, who did not speak English and did not ask for an attorney, to a 14-hour interrogation, refusing to allow her to breastfeed her own infant. Mejia presented different explanations for the toddler’s injury to the police, but eventually said it was her children who had accidentally scalded the infant while she was out of the room.
Prosecutors did not believe her. At Mejia’s trial two years later, they called experts who swore the burn patterns on the baby’s body proved Mejia had held it under the scorching water. She was sentenced to three life sentences. Her four children, three girls and a boy, all under the age of 8, were given up for adoption. She did not see or hear from them again until the hearings reexamining the case began last year.
Art Guerrero, a retired Travis County bailiff who observed Mejia’s murder trial, got the reexamination started. Guerrero contacted the Innocence Project and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office in 2022, telling them he felt Mejia was innocent and had received poor representation at trial. The attorneys found and interviewed Mejia’s children. One of them, referred to in court documents as “A.P.,” told them her siblings had placed the toddler in the tub on the day of the accident and that she had turned on the hot water by mistake. She told the court last year that she was “100 percent” certain her memory was correct and that she has sought counseling for the incident over the years.
The Innocence Project attorneys presented burn experts at subsequent hearings who testified that the baby’s injuries did not prove it had been held underwater. They also noted that the water from the tap in the house where the accident occurred was so hot that the baby could have been fatally scalded in as little as two seconds.
“What we understood two decades ago was that it was impossible for this to be an accident,” Holly Taylor, one of the prosecutors who sent Mejia to prison in 2005 and who now works as the D.A.’s assistant director of civil rights and appeals, told the court. “Our experts were wrong.”
“It’s been a roller coaster, and it’s not over yet,” Guerrero told the Chronicle, noting that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals must agree with Judge Wahlberg if Mejia is to be released from prison. The CCA will likely take months to make that decision. 
This article appears in August 22 • 2025.