Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide – S22 DESIGN THINKING, MEDIA, AND COMMUNITY

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION

Her Whole Truth is an organization that aims to bring awareness to and highlight the stories of women on death row. They are strongly against the death penalty and are interested in seeking justice for these women.

Melissa Lucio was wrongly convicted of murdering her daughter Mariah (who sustained injuries from an accidental fall) and was facing execution on April 27th, 2022. Lucio was coerced into a false confession after she was interrogated by the police for hours. She is also a victim of sexual abuse and domestic violence which put her in a vulnerable position and made her an easy target for a false confession. Despite the fact that there is no forensic or eyewitness evidence that she had any involvement in Mariah’s tragic death, she has been on death row since 2008. Melissa Lucio’s case is an innocence case.

OUR DESIGN CHALLENGES

Working with the Communications team and balancing everyone’s needs while moving at an effective pace
Working off of a previous framework while trying to recognize our own unique challenges with Melissa’s case
Understanding our role within a larger network
Sustainability and longevity of the work that we produce
Working with a strict deadline (her execution date)

MEET THE DESIGN TEAM

HWT’S MAIN GOALS

OUR FRAMEWORK

1. HEAR PHASE

In the hear phase of our process, we focused on learning as much as we can about Melissa’ Lucio’s case. We did this by watching her Hulu documentary (The State of Texas vs. Melissa Lucio), listening to the Jason Flom podcast episode on Melissa Lucio, reading articles online (specifically on the Cornell Death Penalty Worldwide website), learning information through our Stakeholders (Chelsea and Adrienne), and staying up to date on recent news about the case.

2. UX CAT FRAMEWORK

We utilized storytelling throughout the entire process to better understand Melissa Lucio’s story and to also figure out the best way to convey her unique story to the public. There are a lot of important people involved in helping Melissa such as HWT (of course), Innocence Project but there are also people that we have to appeal to such as rural voters and Governor Abbott. Melissa’s case is far from simple and it was crucial that we considered all the moving parts before we started brainstorming ideas in the create phase.

3. Create Phase

After learning about the case, hearing about partner goals, and thinking about how to frame Melissa Lucio’s story, we began brainstorming ideas for how to garner the public’s attention about her case. This was definitely an ever-changing process where we brainstormed an abundance of ideas, but abandoned them to due to constraints. However, we learned to adapt and prioritize ideas that would help Melissa the most.

This was our initial brainstorm list of action items, but we abandoned a lot of them because they either didn’t fit the goals of HWT at this moment, or due to other reasons. For example, we wanted to create an instagram page dedicated to spreading awareness about Melissa Lucio, but this would create a scattered environment for people to actually find information and learn more about Melissa. We did keep some of the ideas that we brainstormed such as portraying Melissa in a feminine light and publishing the daily sun article. However, we brainstormed new ideas along the way which you can see in the final deliverables down below!

4. Deliverables

TAKEAWAYS

Our experience working with Her Whole Truth was unique in that we had to work with a deadline that could have meant the end of someone’s life. All of us working on this case knew that Melissa was innocent, but the difficulty of our job was getting enough people to feel the same so that Melissa could be granted clemency. We turned to social media because we knew that we could reach a much larger and broader audience that way. Nonetheless, we still wanted to bring attention to her case through local levels by creating posters to put up around campus, getting the daily sun article published, and reaching out to social justice student organizations here at Cornell. It was important that we tapped into our resources locally, but also made an effort to get students in Texas and people across the world riled up as well. The entire UX process that we followed was non-linear because of the unique circumstances of working on a case like this. There were times when we had to re-group due to new information/updates to the case, which allowed us to think of new + creative ways that we can get people to care about Melissa’s case.

THE STAY