Rosa Jimenez spent the last 17 years in prison, convicted of the murder of the toddler she was babysitting in 2003. Now a judge has finally dismissed the murder charges against her, fully vindicating her often-declared innocence.
The Texas babysitter was sentenced to 99 years in prison after her 2005 conviction in the 2003 death of a 21-month-old child who choked on a wad of paper towels while in Jimenez’s care, Travis County District Attorney José Garza said Thursday.
During the original trial, the state’s pathologist maintained that it would have been impossible for the toddler to have accidentally choked on the paper towels and prosecutors argued Jimenez forced them into the child’s mouth. As many people have pointed out, in fact, babies and toddlers are known to put anything within reach into their mouths. But her lawyer did little to build a cogent argument in her defense.
In the years since Jimenez’s conviction, numerous experts have said that the toddler’s choking was the result of a tragic accident. Finally, in 2021, came relief for the falsely convicted Jimenez.
“In the case against Rosa Jimenez, it is clear that false medical testimony was used to obtain her conviction, and without that testimony under the law, she would not have been convicted,” Garza said. “Dismissing Ms. Jimenez’s case is the right thing to do.”
Jimenez spent almost 17 years behind bars before being released from prison in 2021, when State District Judge Karen Sage found Jimenez was likely innocent and, at a minimum, entitled to a new trial, according to Garza’s office. In May, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Jimenez was entitled to relief because of “false testimony” during her original trial. Judge Sage signed an order to dismiss the charges on Monday.
At the time that she was charged Jimenez was 7 months pregnant, and had a 1-year-old daughter as well. She has missed all those crucial experiences in her children’s lives as a result of a false conviction. In an interview Rosa says, “My kids are grown, my mom is old. I’m tired, I’m literally tired.”
“When we fail to seek justice and we fail to find the truth, we focus a lot on the instances on what it does to the accused, and you have suffered, but when we fail to make sure justice is done, it’s not just the accused that suffers it’s our whole system that suffers, including victims of tragedies and criminal acts,” Sage said during the dismissal hearing, according to CBS affiliate KEYE. “And in this case the family of a child who has died very tragically has been told for almost two decades that he passed in a way we now know is physically impossible given the science we know.”
Despite the belated justice, and no doubt relieved to be free, Jimenez nevertheless has suffered severe consequences as a result. She was diagnosed with kidney disease 10 years after she was incarcerated. She began dialysis months after her release in 2021. She now needs a kidney transplant.
“For the past 20 years, she has fought for this day, her freedom, and to be reunited with her children,” Potkin said. “Her wrongful conviction was not grounded in medical science, but faulty medical assumptions that turned a tragedy into a crime — with her own attorney doing virtually nothing to defend her.”
Happy to be finally free, Rosa Jimenez looks forward to the future. “Now that I am fully free and about to be a grandmother, I only want to be healthy so I can be part of my grandchild’s life and begin to rebuild my own life,” Jimenez wrote on the National Kidney Registry website.
“For 17 years I’ve been dreaming what it would feel like to touch my kids,” Rosa says. Now she will finally do so, and welcome her first grandchild.
