By Audrey Sawyer
AUSTIN, TX – A wrongful conviction in Texas of Rosa Jimenez has been exonerated after 18 years, after it was determined by medical experts that the death of a 21-month-old child noted in her case was not murdered but died by accident.
The child that Rosa was babysitting had choked on paper towels before dying in a hospital three months later. The conviction was overturned in 2021 after the top pediatric airway experts claimed it to not be an intentional murder. The new trial was ordered in May 2023 earlier this year.
According to the Innocence Project, 71 percent of female exonerees were convicted of crimes that never occurred. This, the project said, is a wrongful conviction that has led to Jimenez missing her own children’s milestones as they grew up.
While Jimenez is now able to be with her family, she is now battling kidney disease, which she incurred in prison, and is waiting on life-saving treatment, said Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation and Jimenez’s attorney.
Potkin added, “Her wrongful conviction was not grounded in medical science, but faulty medical assumptions that turned tragedy into a crime—with her own (original trial) attorney doing virtually nothing to defend her.”
Potkin argued that this is not an isolated occurrence, but that there is a “real, pervasive problem in our country when it comes to how the criminal legal system treats the caregivers of the children who die or are hurt. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent caregivers and parents in prison today based on faulty, unscientific medical testimony misclassifying accidents or illness as abuse.”
The Jimenez case has attracted attention both locally and nationally, including the NBA’s San Antonio Spurs Head Coach Gregg Popovich, who said the prosecution and his team deserve “great credit for helping the Innocence Project establish Rosa’s innocence with new scientific evidence.”
