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Thread: Angelina Rodriguez - California Death Row

  1. #11
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    Oral arguments on direct appeal are scheduled for the 7th of January.

    http://www.courts.ca.gov/documents/c...s/SJAN714A.PDF

  2. #12
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    California's high court upholds death penalty for woman convicted of poisoning husband

    The California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the death penalty of a woman convicted of poisoning her husband to collect on a life insurance policy.

    The high court ruled on Thursday that Angelina Rodriguez received a fair trial in 2004. It said if any errors occurred during her trial, they were harmless.

    A Los Angeles County jury convicted Rodriguez of killing her husband in 2000 by pouring anti-freeze into his Gatorade. Investigators say that Rodriguez had also slipped her husband some oleander, a poisonous plant that grows wild in Southern California.

    Rodriguez had taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy a few months before her healthy 41-year-old husband died. It took investigators several months to arrest and charge Rodriguez after her husband's death because a cause of death could not be immediately established.

    According to court documents, Rodriguez was anxious to collect on the life insurance policy and needed a death certificate stating cause of death to do so. Investigators secretly recorded numerous phone calls with Rodriguez where she made numerous incriminating statements while attempting to blame the death on her husband's co-worker at the school where he worked.

    During her trial, prosecutors also presented evidence that she had killed her 14-month old daughter in 1993 to collect a $50,000 insurance policy. Her daughter choked on a plastic nipple that had broken free from a bottle made by Gerber. She and her then-husband collected a $710,000 settlement from Gerber after the couple filed a lawsuit.

    A search of Rodriguez house after her arrest in 2001 turned up an expert's report commissioned by the couple's lawyer that concluded the nipple could not have been broken off while the baby was feeding. It also emerged that Rodriguez purchased the $50,000 life insurance policy 2 months before the baby died without telling her then-husband, the baby's father. Rodriguez was named the sole beneficiary.

    "This circumstance alone strongly suggests she murdered her daughter to collect the life insurance proceeds, just as she later murdered her husband to collect on a life insurance policy that she insisted he take out," Justice Ming Chin wrote for the unanimous 7-judge court. "After her daughter died, she seemed more concerned about collecting the pacifier parts and suing Gerber than about losing her."

    Only 20 of the state's 747 condemned inmates are women. Executions have been on hold in California since 2006 because of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of California's death penalty.

    (Source: The Associated Press)
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  3. #13
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    In today's orders, the United States Supreme Court DENIED Rodriguez's petition for certiorari.

    Lower Ct: Supreme Court of California
    Case Nos.: (S122123)
    Decision Date: February 20, 2014

    http://www.supremecourt.gov/search.a...es/14-5340.htm

  4. #14
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    How greed kept one woman from getting away with her husband’s murder

    It was a slip of the tongue that helped detectives solve the 2000 murder of Jose Francisco Rodriguez. The slip led the dead man’s wife straight to California’s death row.

    She might have gotten away with it — and 14 years later the case would have remained cold — except detectives said his wife, Angelina Rodriguez, got greedy and insisted on cashing in a $250,000 insurance policy on her husband’s life.

    “Her talking to us? That was the difference,” Los Angeles County sheriff’s homicide Detective Brian Steinwand said in a recent interview. “We might never have solved the case if she wasn’t talking.”

    The death of Francisco Rodriguez could have been taken right from the script of a made-for-television mystery. The first act opened in the early morning hours of Sept. 9, 2000, when police were called to the Rodriguez home in the 800 block of North Marconi Street in Montebello. Angelina Rodriguez greeted them at the door and led them to her husband, lying in a pool of blood on the floor of the couple’s bedroom.

    His case is one of 11,244 homicides chronicled by the Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner between Jan. 1, 2000, and Dec. 31, 2010. Of those cases, 4,862 — or 46 percent — remain unsolved, an analysis of the data by the Los Angeles News Group found. Of the rest, 4,573 cases were solved by an arrest, 1,066 were closed for other reasons, including the death of the suspect or because it was an officer-involved shooting. The status of an additional 682 cases remains unknown. The remaining 61 deaths were not investigated as homicides.

    Of all those cases, just one — his — involved the use of oleander and antifreeze.

    Although they didn’t know how he had died, investigators were immediately suspicious of his wife’s odd behavior.

    “When you deal with someone like that, they are usually very upset, and they don’t want to talk to you,” Montebello police Officer Stephen Sharpe recalled later. “As soon as I began speaking with her, it was as if she had forgotten about what was going on.”

    And, she wasn’t crying.

    “I may have seen some tears, but there was a great lack of them. And, as soon as I would talk to her, ask her a question, she would immediately snap out of it and answer the questions real quick. In my experience, usually someone who lost their husband, they’re difficult to speak with and communicate to.”

    Although her husband had just died, Angelina Rodriguez had no problem talking to anyone about the case. In fact, court documents say she called her insurance company about 10 minutes after the coroner’s investigators left her house.

    She wanted to know how long it would take to get paid. Just three weeks before her husband’s death, she had taken out a $250,000 life insurance policy on him, West Covina insurance salesman Mickey Marracino said.

    An autopsy couldn’t determine what killed Rodriguez, 41, who by all accounts had been healthy all of his life. Investigators found Rodriguez visited a hospital with food poisoning symptoms a couple of days before his untimely death. But postmortem blood samples and standard toxicology screens revealed nothing unusual, coroner’s toxicologist Joe Muto would later say.

    As a result, no determination was made as to his cause of death.

    Without a determination, Angelina Rodriguez couldn’t get a death certificate. Without a death certificate, she couldn’t get paid.

    She began to pester investigators and her insurance agent. Eventually Montebello authorities asked sheriff’s detectives Steinwand and his partner, Joe Holmes, to take over. During a series of interviews that took place over the course of several weeks, Angelina Rodriguez attempted to cast blame on one of her husband’s co-workers. When the detectives pressed her for details, she said she thought her husband had been poisoned. In fact, she said she believed oleander and anti-freeze had been used.

    Steinwand and Holmes ordered additional tests from the lab at UC Davis. The presence of both poisons were found in the body. Angelina Rodriguez was arrested. A jury found her guilty of murder and recommended she be sentenced to death.

    In January 2003, Judge William Pounders made Angelina Rodriguez the 15th woman on California’s death row. In 2014, Rodriguez’s last appeal was denied by the state Supreme Court. No date has been set for her execution.

    http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/gene...usbands-murder
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  5. #15
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    On September 15, 2014, Rodriguez filed a habeas petition before the California Supreme Court.

    http://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca.g...hSQCAgCg%3D%3D

  6. #16
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    Rodriguez's habeas case has been fully briefed since December 27, 2019.

    https://appellatecases.courtinfo.ca....hSQCAgCg%3D%3D

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