On a bright October morning in 1994, Jalisco-born Dora Buenrostro killed her three children and drove to the local police station in San Jacinto, California to tell officers that her estranged husband was raging around the apartment with a knife.
The attempt to implicate him was in vain, however, as detectives quickly established that he was in Los Angeles at the time of the murders.
In the following months, police noted that Buenrostro showed a complete lack of remorse for the killings. During the trial, she went against her lawyer’s advice by maintaining her innocence and testifying on her own behalf. In an angry tirade, she described the hearing as “a waste of time,” and lashed out at her own attorneys. The verdict may have been different, Buenrostro told them, “if you guys would have done your job a little better.”
Media outlets began to speculate on her mental health. Family members testified that Buenrostro had been acting in an erratic manner for months, and would describe hallucinations in which they transformed into animals.
“I even thought she was using drugs,” her mother said. “Something happened to her.”
An arresting officer remarked that Buenrostro “was like a roller coaster. She went from laughing and joking to being tired.”
Yet expert witnesses failed to convince the jury that Buenrostro was mentally unfit to stand trial. She was sentenced to death on October 2, 1998.
Now age 49, Buenrostro is a prisoner at the Central Women’s Facility of Chowchilla, California.
Her situation is unusual insofar as she is one of only two foreign women on death row in the United States, the other being British national Linda Carty.
Yet the controversies around the case are far from unique. As with many other Mexican death penalty cases, consular and mental health issues raise doubts about her sentence, which was carried out in California, the state with the largest death row in the union.
The Buenrostro case turned up the diplomatic heat with Mexico. While U.S. death penalty sentences for foreign nationals are always a source of contention with allies, this is especially true with Mexico, which is the home country of 59 of the 138 foreign nationals currently on death row. Of these inmates, eight are originally from Jalisco, more than any other Mexican state.
In contrast with other diplomatic controversies, such as drug and trade policy, Mexico makes an active effort to hold its own on the death penalty issue.
The government lobbies to defend its citizens and in the first decade of this century, more than 400 Mexicans were removed from death row at the request of Mexican authorities.
Mexico also refuses to extradite suspects who face capital punishment. Such was the case when Cesar Armando Laurean, a Guadalajara-born former U.S. marine was arrested after fleeing south. Laurean, who had murdered his former lover, was saved by his escape to Mexico, as in accordance with the extradition treaty he was eventually given life without parole instead of the death penalty.
Mexico even took the United States to the International Court of Justice in 2004. The court decided that local U.S. authorities had violated international law by failing to inform Mexican Consulates of the arrests. In so doing, the court ruled, the United States had deprived 51 condemned Mexican nationals of their right to assistance from consular representatives.
Along with consular issues, the defense case for murder suspects such as Buenrostro often rests on mental illness.
Yet a 2014 report by U.S. lawyers Robert Smith, Sophie Cull and Zoe Robinson suggested that juries do not always take mitigating psychological conditions into account.
The report, entitled “The Failure of Mitigation?” said that 54 percent of people executed in the United States between 2011 and 2013 had been diagnosed with or showed symptoms of an acute mental illness.
The authors of the report said that failings on the part of defense attorneys often prevented juries from learning about mitigating traits and taking account of them, as the law demanded.
In Buenrostro’s case, her own decision to give testimony (against the advice of her lawyers) seems to have sealed her fate.
“It was something that we had no control over,” said defense attorney David Macher.
The fact that Buenrostro committed her brutal crime in California made her death sentence more likely. In fact, Buenrostro is one of 39 Mexican inmates on death row in the state. California has a unique stance on capital punishment – it has handed out hundreds of death sentences but has not executed a single prisoner in the last decade.
Cormac J. Carney, a federal judge, ruled in 2014 that the system was so plagued with delays that it “violates the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.” An appeals court overturned his decision the following year.
The obstructions in California’s death penalty process are due to a series of legal challenges against the drugs used in executions.
In 2006, a judge ruled that a three-chemical lethal injection could cause inhumane suffering if one of the drugs had no effect, leading to the kind of grisly botched executions reported in other states.
Such practical considerations have led many to question whether California, or any other state for that matter, is capable of humanely enacting the death penalty.
The fact that 152 death row inmates have been exonerated in the past 43 years further discredits the system.
Yet this focus on practicalities may obscure the more fundamental question of whether governments can ever morally justify executions. Even if capital punishment is correctly administered, there are growing doubts in the United States as to whether or not it is a civilized practice.
A 1985 Gallup poll reported that 17 percent of Americans opposed the death penalty. Thirty years on, this minority had grown to 37 percent.
This changing tide of opinion has been reflected by legislation; eight states have abolished the death penalty in the past decade.
There is even hope for the 743 inmates on death row in California, Buenrostro included. The state is including a measure to repeal the death penalty on this November’s presidential ballot.
Considering these developments, the abolition of capital punishment in the United States may be only a matter of time.
For now, the 59 Mexicans on death row in the United States will have wait to see whether these changes arrive in time to save them.