Angelina Rodriguez was convicted in October 2003 of the first-degree murder of her husband, Jose Francisco Rodriguez, who died in Montebello, in Los Angeles County, on September 9, 2000. The jury found two special circumstances true: murder by administering poison, and murder for financial gain. She was also convicted of attempting to dissuade a witness. At the penalty phase of the same trial, prosecutors put before the jury a second death, that of her infant daughter in September 1993, and argued that she had murdered the child. That death was not a charge in the case, and she was never convicted of it. The jury returned a death verdict on November 12, 2003, and she was sentenced to death on January 12, 2004.
The California Supreme Court affirmed the judgment unanimously in February 2014. In October 2024, after the Los Angeles County District Attorney's Office declined to seek the death penalty again and conceded a flaw in the penalty phase, a judge resentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. She has always denied killing either her husband or her daughter.
Her life before 2000 is not on record beyond what bore on the trial. The case is one conviction in one death, penalty-phase evidence about a second, and a long run of appeals that ended with a reduced sentence.
Rodriguez and her husband married in April 2000. They met through their work and, after the wedding, moved to Montebello. Jose Francisco Rodriguez, whom friends and family called Frank, was 41 years old at the time of his death and in good health.
In July 2000, about three months after the wedding, the couple took out a life insurance policy of $250,000 with Angelina Rodriguez as the beneficiary. The financial motive in the case rests on that policy. The prosecution's evidence was that a friend heard her speak of killing her husband for the money, and that the policy was the object of the crime. It is the only motive on record, and the one the jury found when it returned the special circumstance of murder for financial gain.
Frank Rodriguez died on September 9, 2000. In the days immediately after, his wife made telephone calls to relatives and to the insurance company. Witnesses, among them police officers, family members and an insurance agent, later told the jury that she seemed calm and showed little emotion. The defense argued on appeal that these descriptions were speculation. The California Supreme Court disagreed, holding that the witnesses were describing what they had seen themselves and that the testimony bore on whether she was grieving.
Several months passed before investigators could arrest and charge her.
Detectives regarded Rodriguez as a suspect from the start but let her believe that they accepted her explanations. Her conversations with them and with others were recorded. The recordings captured incriminating statements as she tried to place the blame on a co-worker of her husband.
Rodriguez was arrested on February 7, 2001.
The charge of attempting to dissuade a witness arose after her arrest. While she was in custody she pressured a woman who had given evidence to change her account. Later, in 2002, recorded conversations captured her discussing how that witness might be killed. A jury convicted her of the dissuasion count. On a separate count of soliciting the witness's murder it could not reach a verdict, and the court declared a mistrial. No retrial of that count is on record.
The case went to trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court before Judge William R. Pounders. Jury selection began on September 29, 2003, and the presentation of evidence began on October 15, 2003. The jury returned its guilty verdicts in October 2003.
Her counsel at trial, appointed in August 2002, had followed an earlier, privately retained lawyer whom she had said she had removed. The question of her counsel, and her treatment in the county jail before trial, became grounds on appeal, but the California Supreme Court found no prejudice to her ability to defend herself.
California capital trials have two stages. After the guilty verdict and the special circumstance findings, the same jury hears evidence in aggravation and in mitigation and then chooses between death and life without parole. Evidence of other violent crime by the defendant, even when it was never charged, may be presented as an aggravating circumstance.
The prosecution used that route in this case. It presented evidence that in September 1993 Rodriguez had murdered her infant daughter. The prosecution's theory was one of financial motive: the child's life had been insured, the insurer paid, and a settlement followed a later lawsuit. The jury considered the evidence along with the facts of the 2000 murder.
Defense witnesses answered it. Experts disputed the prosecution's findings about the death, and relatives and a psychiatrist described her history of abuse and her conduct as a mother and as a possible prisoner. The jury nonetheless returned a verdict of death.
Rodriguez has consistently denied that she harmed her daughter.
On January 12, 2004, Judge Pounders denied the automatic motion to modify the death verdict and imposed the sentence of death. He told the courtroom that in twenty years on the bench he had never seen a colder heart. Rodriguez spoke before the sentence was imposed. She said she did not have remorse for a murder she had not committed, and she maintained that she was innocent.
At that time she was among a small number of women under sentence of death in California. In February 2014, 20 of the state's 747 condemned prisoners were women, and executions in the state had been on hold since 2006 because of lawsuits over the death penalty.
A death sentence in California is reviewed by the state Supreme Court without any need for the prisoner to file. The appeal, People v. Rodriguez, was docketed as S122123. On February 20, 2014, the court affirmed the judgment in an opinion by Justice Ming W. Chin, joined by all seven justices. Its citation is 58 Cal.4th 587.
The court rejected a long list of claims. It found no basis for reversal in her conditions of confinement before trial or in the limits placed on her telephone use, which the court tied to her misuse of the privilege. It held that she had a full opportunity to defend herself, that the trial court did not err in declining to replace her appointed lawyer or in the handling of her retained lawyer, and that nothing in the record required a hearing on her competence to stand trial. It found that her brief absences from some proceedings did not affect her defense and that a claim of judicial bias had been forfeited and in any case lacked merit. It upheld the excusal for cause of two prospective jurors whose views on capital punishment or on police testimony justified it, and it held that admitting the prior statements of a witness who claimed not to remember them did not violate the confrontation clause. One presumed error in the guilt phase was harmless.
On the 1993 death, the court rejected her argument that the evidence should not have been admitted at the penalty phase. Justice Chin wrote that there was ample evidence that she had murdered her daughter. In sum, the court found that she had received a fair trial and that any errors were harmless.
Her lawyer told the press that she would ask the United States Supreme Court to review the decision. The outcome of any such petition is not on record.
After the direct appeal, Rodriguez filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus. It argued that her trial lawyer was ineffective at the penalty phase because the lawyer failed to move to suppress evidence about her daughter's death that police had obtained under a search warrant limited to the investigation of her husband's death. The matter was sent back to the Los Angeles County Superior Court.
The District Attorney's Office conceded that she had a legitimate claim of ineffective assistance of counsel at the penalty phase and declined to seek the death penalty again. On October 31, 2024, Judge James R. Dabney of the Los Angeles County Superior Court resentenced her to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The convictions themselves, for the murder of her husband with special circumstances and for attempting to dissuade a witness, were not set aside.
She was 56 at the time of the resentencing, held in a state prison in California's Central Valley. Whether she has since been moved is not on record.
Rodriguez has denied both deaths. At her sentencing she maintained that she was innocent of her husband's murder. She has denied killing her daughter, and the daughter's death was never the subject of a verdict of guilt or innocence. What exists is a penalty-phase presentation, a jury that weighed it, and a Supreme Court holding that the evidence was properly admitted and sufficient. The 2024 resentencing arose from a claim about how that evidence was handled by her lawyer, not from a finding that the evidence was untrue.
The jury resolved the questions about the 2000 death against her, and the verdict and special circumstance findings were left in place in 2024.
April 2000: Angelina Rodriguez and Jose Francisco Rodriguez marry; they move to Montebello.
July 2000: a life insurance policy of $250,000 is taken out with her as beneficiary.
September 9, 2000: Jose Francisco Rodriguez dies at age 41.
February 7, 2001: she is arrested.
2002: while in custody she discusses with others the killing of a witness; the conversations are recorded.
September 29, 2003: jury selection begins; evidence begins October 15, 2003.
October 2003: guilty verdicts, with two special circumstances found true.
November 12, 2003: the jury returns a death verdict.
January 12, 2004: sentenced to death by Judge William R. Pounders.
February 20, 2014: the California Supreme Court affirms the judgment unanimously.
October 31, 2024: resentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole by Judge James R. Dabney.
November 18, 2024: press reports the resentencing; she remains in the Central Valley prison where she had been held.