Questions raised by a USC law student about the conviction of a woman accused of setting a fatal fire in the Garment District of Downtown Los Angeles more than 20 years ago have led to her release from prison on parole — and immediate deportation back to her native Mexico.
Members of a state parole board recently voted to parole Rosa Maria Sanchez based on concerns over her representation at trial in 1987. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined to review the decision by a parole board, essentially approving the action.
Sanchez faced a complication, however, because she was a legal immigrant at the time of her conviction but a release from prison by the action of the parole board left her as a convicted felon. That made her subject to deportation, so prison officials were required to transfer her to the custody of the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency upon her release.
It appears that a pardon from Schwarzenegger would be the only way for Sanchez to regain legal immigration status and return to California. There were no indicators as of presstime that Schwarzenegger was considering a pardon, although advocates for Sanchez said they plan to ask for one on her behalf.
The questions surrounding Sanchez — who had served nearly 23 years of a 25-years-to-life sentence for first degree murder by the time the parole board made its recent decision — followed work on the case by Jennifer Farrell as part of the USC Gould School of Law's Post-Conviction Justice Project, which aims to aid individuals who might be wrongly imprisoned.
Farrell became convinced of Sanchez' innocence, noting that a defense attorney in the case failed during her trial to call five witnesses who could have testified that Sanchez was at home at the time of the fatal blaze. Farrell also contended that Sanchez had a successful business, contradicting the prosecution's claim that she set fire to a competitor's business for financial reasons.
Farrell's work on the case led the state parole board to recommend that Sanchez be released. The judge who presided at the trial of Sanchez sent a letter to Schwarzenegger, telling the governor that the case continued to "haunt" him over the years because he feared that justice had not been served.
Sanchez is a mother of four children who owned a clothing business in the Garment District prior to her conviction for the fire, which occurred on December 8, 1985.
Jerry Sullivan is editor of the L.A. Garment & Citizen.
Photo from USC Gould School of Law.
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