A Texas appeals court threw out a ruling that declared a death row inmate innocent, choosing to defend an 18-year-old conviction rather than reckon with prosecutorial misconduct and suppressed evidence. Melissa Lucio, 58, remains on death row — and the state of Texas remains on track to execute her.

The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, in a 5-4 decision issued Thursday, rejected a trial judge's 62-page finding that Lucio is "actually innocent" of capital murder in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Mariah. The unsigned majority opinion claimed the trial judge relied too heavily on Lucio's interpretation of events and not enough on the prosecution's. Four judges dissented.

This is the same court that stayed Lucio's execution two days before her scheduled lethal injection in 2022 and ordered the review that led to the innocence finding. Now that the review didn't go the state's way, the court reversed course.

Lucio was convicted in 2008 after prosecutors argued Mariah died from abuse, pointing to bruises on the child's body. Lucio's defense has long maintained the toddler suffered a severe head injury from an accidental fall down a steep staircase two days before her death — new scientific evidence unavailable at trial backs that account.

The trial judge's 2024 innocence ruling found that prosecutors presented false testimony and suppressed evidence. Prosecutors even conceded during the appeal that they had withheld material evidence. None of that moved the appeals court majority.

Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation at the Innocence Project and one of Lucio's attorneys, said the legal team will take the fight to federal court. "We will proceed to federal court and do everything in our power to make sure Melissa … an innocent mother who has suffered unbelievably, is not executed for a crime that never occurred," Potkin said.

If exonerated, Lucio would be the first woman declared innocent from Texas death row, where 18 men have been exonerated since 1976.

The same court, on the same day, issued another 5-4 decision — this one letting an acquittal stand for Crystal Mason, a Black Texas woman who spent nearly a decade fighting a five-year prison sentence for casting a provisional ballot that was never counted. Mason was on supervised release for a federal tax felony when she voted in 2016; she maintained she didn't know she was ineligible and federal probation officials testified they never told her she couldn't vote. The court declined to explain why it reversed its earlier decision to hear the prosecutor's appeal.

Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells made clear the state's posture: "Illegal voting remains a crime in Texas. If there is evidence that someone knowingly violates our election laws in Tarrant County, we will investigate it and, when the evidence supports it, prosecute it."

So the court that won't let a voting conviction stand also won't let an innocence ruling stand when the state's own prosecutors admitted misconduct and a life is on the line. The constitutional right to due process isn't supposed to be a function of which outcome the state prefers. But in Texas, the system protects its convictions — and when a conviction threatens to embarrass the system, the system closes ranks.

The question now is whether a federal court will do what the state court wouldn't: put truth above the finality of a flawed verdict.