Coming up.

They put on a paper tag, they commit their crime, and then they take it off immediately and go back to the real tags.

For Vault Studios, I'm Reid Redmond.

And I'm Will Johnson. You're listening to The Daily Crime.

Fighting crime in Texas, one license plate at a time.

It's a venue for criminal elements to be able to get away undetected or with less detection.

Also in Texas, the scheduled execution, a 52-year-old Melissa Lucio was halted earlier this week.

Today we learned a lower court will now review claims of new evidence which could exonerate

Lucio. Lucio's attorney, Vanessa Potkin, says the state used false testimony to obtain her conviction

and withheld information to her defense at her trial.

Fake license plates have been at the center of some high-profile crimes in Texas recently.

Will, let's start there. Tell us about some of those cases.

So fake tags might not be the first thing you think about when talking about violent crimes, but there's actually a real documented connection between criminal activity and fake paper

tags, at least in Texas, and it would be awfully interesting to look at other states and across

the nation. But Texas is apparently a big hotbed for this problem. So fake tags were involved in

several cases in the Houston area last year, a lot more than several, but several high-profile ones, including the murder of 17-year-old David Castro, who was shot

and killed after an Astros game. There was also the case of a New Orleans police detective and

his friend who were shot and killed while visiting the Houston area. Here's KHOU11 reporter

Ugochi Aloka with more on that.

The New Orleans cop visiting Houston was shot and killed in the Galleria area in August.

The getaway car, police needed to find, had temporary tags, tags that turned out to be bogus.

Texas is the laughing stock of paper plates in the United States.

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