The accused are mothers, daughters and wives. But when women kill, it challenges society's vision of them as nurturers and sometimes makes it difficult for jurors to impose a death sentence, legal experts say.
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But Dora Buenrostro's case falls into a category that can prove an exception: women who kill their children. Such murders shatter expectations and can provoke jurors to overreact, Koonan said.
"She's going against the most fundamental rule," said Koonan, who was unfamiliar with the Buenrostro case. "You tap into some real fundamental anger that people (on juries) bring into that situation."
Women account for a small percentage of the death sentences imposed in the United States. They are far less likely than men to kill, making up about 13 percent of all arrests for murder, according to research by Victor Streib, a death penalty expert and law school dean at Ohio Northern University.
Women account for less than 2 percent of death row inmates in the United States. People often view them as less powerful than men, Koonan said, and thus less responsible or culpable for their acts.
Women usually kill husbands, lovers or their children as a result of domestic problems. If convicted, the charge is often second-degree murder or manslaughter, which does not carry a death sentence, said Lawrence Brown, executive director of the California District Attorney's Association.
Women also tend not to murder during rapes, robberies or burglaries -- crimes that can prompt prosecutors to seek the death penalty, Brown said.
Michael Soccio, who prosecuted Buenrostro, said he asked prospective jurors at the start of the trial whether her gender would color their judgment. If she were convicted, he asked, could they sentence her to death?
Jurors said Wednesday that gender did not affect their decision.
Buenrostro is the second Southern California woman in recent months to receive the death penalty. In San Diego County, Veronica Gonzales of Chula Vista was sentenced July 21 for the torture murder of her niece. Four-year-old Genevieve Rojas, who spent most of her life in Home Gardens, was beaten and starved for months before she was scalded to death in a bathtub in 1995, said Deputy District Attorney Dan Goldstein.
Goldstein wanted to confront the gender issue head-on and asked potential jurors what a murderer looks like.
"Do you think a murderer can have pretty brown eyes and long brown hair?" he asked. "I argued it till I was blue -- that there isn't a different rule of law for women."
Gonzales' husband, Ivan, also was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
With Wednesday's verdict, Buenrostro will likely join Cynthia Lynn Coffman as the only other Inland-area woman on California's death row. Coffman was sentenced in San Bernardino County in 1989 for murdering two women.
Coffman, 36, and boyfriend James Gregory Marlow kidnapped, raped, robbed and strangled Corinna Novis at her home in November 1986. They stole her car and drove to Huntington Beach to look for a business to rob. They settled on a dry-cleaning shop, kidnapped 19-year-old Lynel Murray and strangled her.
Don Jordan, Coffman's attorney, argued she was a battered woman.
"Our main thrust was that she was under the domination of Marlow and the jury rejected it," he said. The argument was undercut when her love letters to Marlow after they were arrested were presented at the trial.
Published 7/30/1998