Carmen Mejia, a Honduran immigrant who was sentenced to life in prison for the 2003 scalding death of an infant in her care, was formally declared innocent in an Austin courtroom on Monday.
“I’m now signing this order dismissing all charges against you, ordering you released from the custody of the state of Texas, and finding you actually innocent of the crimes for which you were wrongfully convicted,” Travis County District Court Judge David Wahlberg told Mejia at the end of a March 9 hearing. Wahlberg then ordered the sheriff’s deputies guarding Mejia to stand back and allow her to embrace her three daughters. The daughters clustered around their mother in the silent courtroom, feeling her touch for the first time in over two decades, hugging her and weeping.
Mejia’s exoneration concludes years of reexamination of her case by the Travis County justice system and the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. She was found guilty in 2005 of murdering 10-month-old Abelardo Casiano, allegedly submerging him in scalding bathwater as she babysat him and four of her own young children. Questioned by Austin police officers after taking Casiano to the hospital, Mejia attempted to explain the burn injuries by claiming that the infant had pulled a pot of boiling water onto himself. That, Mejia’s defenders have said, was an effort to protect her daughters from blame. One of the daughters, known in court documents as A.P., testified in 2024 that it was she who had accidentally placed the infant in hot bathwater while her mother was out of the room.
A Travis County medical examiner’s investigation of the baby’s injuries found that they were inconsistent with being splashed by a pot of boiling water. “That turned the manner of death determination from an accident to a homicide,” said Travis County Assistant District Attorney Colin Bellair, in the opening testimony of the March 9 hearing. “From the start, the worst was assumed. It was decided that a woman who had no criminal history, no history of child abuse, had, in the words of the trial prosecutor, ‘the coldest, darkest, blackest evil heart that you could have.’ We could not have been more wrong.”
“From the start, the worst was assumed. It was decided that a woman who had no criminal history, no history of child abuse, had, in the words of the trial prosecutor, ‘the coldest, darkest, blackest evil heart that you could have.’ We could not have been more wrong.”
Travis County Assistant District Attorney Colin Bellair
Art Guerrero, who served as the bailiff in Mejia’s trial, spoke at length during the hearing. He said he remembered being worried that she was not receiving proper legal representation and recalled the moment he began to believe she was innocent. Mejia had been found guilty and Abelardo Casiano’s father confronted her in court.
“The question that he asked was, ‘Carmen, why did you do this to my son?’” Guerrero remembered. “And she looked at him straight in the eye, and she said, ‘Yo no le hice,’ which means, ‘I did not do it.’ At that moment, right after saying those words, she started to say something else, but she was completely shut off by one of her defense attorneys in Spanish: ‘Callarse! No diga nada,’ which means, ‘Shut up, don’t say anything.’”
Guerrero said he thought about Mejia for years after her conviction and often asked God to provide her a new trial. Finally, he was able to get the Innocence Project and the newly elected D.A., José Garza, to begin investigating the case. Judge Wahlberg thanked Guerrero at the conclusion of his testimony, saying, “If there’s a hero in this tragedy, it’s Art Guerrero.”
Attorneys with the Innocence Project spoke next. Timothy Gumkowski said he felt privileged to have seen a relationship grow between Mejia and her children. Her three daughters and one son were adopted by an Austin family soon after her arrest and did not see or hear from her again until prosecutors with the D.A.’s Conviction Integrity Unit began reexamining the case. Vanessa Potkin, who led the effort to secure the exoneration of Rosa Jimenez – another undocumented Hispanic woman accused of murder in Austin in 2003, just six months before Mejia – emphasized the pain the wrongful conviction created for Mejia and her kids.
“Ms. Mejia’s four children lost their opportunity to have a relationship with their mother, which left a void and scarred their lives in ways that can never be repaired,” Potkin said. “Ms. Mejia was left to pray that her children were being loved and cared for, to wonder as the years passed what they looked like, who they were growing up to be. The first time they set eyes on each other again was in this court in 2024.”
Next, Mejia’s daughters offered statements. Her youngest, referred to by the initials M.C., said the only thing she’d known about her birth mother growing up was her name and that she was in prison. “Not knowing the woman who gave birth to me was extremely difficult,” she said. “I could never say that I looked just like my mom, or that I got my eyes from her.” Mejia’s middle child talked about the difficulty of following the rules governing contact between Mejia and her children, once they began visiting her in jail. “All I want is to be able to see and hug my mom,” she said. “It’s unbelievably hard to only get 20 minutes in front of glass.”
Mejia’s eldest daughter, referred to as A.P., remembered the guilt she felt for accidentally putting Abelardo Casiano in the bath. “As a small child, I had turned on the water without realizing how hot it was. For many years, especially as a young teenager, I quietly carried the belief that somehow I was responsible, without the knowledge or maturity to process it. I was a child trying to understand a tragic situation. The guilt stayed with me for very long.”
Mejia herself testified next, saying that she prayed to God for an angel while in prison and never lost hope. “Throughout those 20 years, I kept my faith and my hope that God was going to do justice,” she said in Spanish, her words read by an interpreter. “With faith, I hoped justice was going to be done. Now we see God’s justice done.”
After listening to the family’s testimonies, it was time for Wahlberg to bring the hearing to a close. He seemed to wipe tears from his eyes as he congratulated the attorneys on their work and prepared to sign the order exonerating Mejia.
“I wish that signing this order here this afternoon would be the end of this tragedy,” Wahlberg said. “Unfortunately, I don’t believe it will be. It’s my understanding that Carmen Mejia had legal status at the time of this incident, but that that legal status is no longer in place, and that there is an immigration detainer on file with Travis County. I think that means that there is an extreme likelihood that Ms. Mejia will be taken into custody by federal immigration authorities within the next 48 hours. That’s a tragedy that should not happen. I can’t change that.”
Wahlberg asked that any federal immigration authorities monitoring Mejia’s case take into account the fact that she has served nearly 23 years for a crime she did not commit, that she was not involved in any violent offense while in prison, and that she is not a flight risk because she wants to stay in Austin with her children.
As of Tuesday afternoon, Mejia remains in the Travis County jail on an immigration hold.