Death sentence upheld for woman who poisoned husband

The California Supreme Court on Thursday upheld a death sentence for Angelina Rodriguez, 45, the Montebello woman who poisoned her husband with antifreeze-laced Gatorade. Jose Francisco Rodriguez, a 41-year-old Latino, died in September 2000.

Three months after the two married, Angelina Rodriguez took out a $250,000 life insurance policy on her husband and began trying to kill him, The Times reported in 2004. First came oleander soup, which sent the man to the hospital. Then she loosened the gas cap on the clothes dryer at home and left to visit a friend. Finally, the antifreeze -- so much of it, according to a 2005 Times report on the medical examiner's conclusions, that the chemical seeped from his eyes.

In her original trial, in 2003, Angelina Rodriguez was implicated by evidence in the death of her daughter with a previous husband. The 13-month-old child, Alicia, died in 1993 when she choked on a rubber nipple two months after Rodriguez took out a $50,000 insurance policy on the baby without telling her then-husband. In her most recent challenge of her murder conviction and sentence, Rodriguez argued, among other things, that the jury should not have been told she killed her daughter. Rodriguez was not charged or convicted in connection with the girl's death, but law enforcement reexamined it after the poisoning of her husband.

The court said on Thursday that the jury was entitled to hear about the child’s death during the penalty phase of deliberations. "There was ample evidence that defendant murdered her daughter," one justice wrote.

At her sentencing in January 2004, Angelina Rodriguez claimed she did not kill her husband.

"I have lived my life with integrity," she said in an hour-long speech in court. "I broke and made a few terrible, stupid mistakes that I regret very much. ... But murder is not on that list."

She also said she could not have made her husband drink antifreeze.

"Are you suggesting he took it on his own?" Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge William R. Pounders asked incredulously.

"I know he did," Rodriguez replied. Then she challenged the judge: "Would your wife be able to hand you a cup of antifreeze?"

Rodriguez's lawyer said Thursday that she would ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the California high court's decision.

-- Matt Ballinger

Photo: Jose Francisco Rodriguez in 1998. Credit: Graham Barclay / Courtesy of Shirley Coers, Jose Francisco Rodriguez's sister