Reluctance to Execute Women May Save Caro

Sixty years ago this week, Juanita “the Duchess” Spinelli--described by a San Quentin warden as “the coldest, hardest character, male or female, I have ever known”--walked into the gas chamber and became the first woman executed by the state of California.

Since then, three women have followed and 12 await death by lethal injection. Whether Socorro Caro joins them is to be decided by a Ventura County jury, but if history is a guide, she’ll be more likely to spend the rest of her days in prison without parole.

Earlier this month, Caro was convicted of first-degree murder for shooting three of her young sons as they slept. If she receives the death penalty, she could become one of just a handful of women in U.S. history to be executed for killing their children, according to historians of capital punishment.

Even so, juries in California appear to be showing less mercy these days toward mothers who kill. Four such women--one of them a grandmother who knifed her two grandchildren--now sit on death row at the California Women’s Correctional Facility in Chowchilla.

“Given the long history of women not being executed for this kind of crime, that’s a surprise,” said Victor L. Streib, a visiting professor of law at Michigan State University who has done extensive studies of women and the death penalty. “Researchers like me are following this to see if it’s a blip on the radar screen or a new trend.”

Either way, the jury that convicted Caro on Nov. 5 will grapple starting Tuesday with a provocative question: If the death of children at a mother’s hand is the ultimate betrayal, should that mother be dealt the ultimate punishment?

For years, the answer has been clear.

“We’re very reluctant to take the life of a woman,” Streib said. “I once asked a prominent Texan why that’s so. He told me: ‘Texans don’t treat their women that way.’ ”

The women who have been put to death have killed for money, for love, for reasons so twisted they’ve never been fully understood. Elizabeth “Ma” Duncan, the last woman executed in California, hired two men to kill her daughter-in-law, who was buried alive beside a remote Ventura County road. By Streib’s count, 561 women have been executed since 1632. Only five of them had killed their children, he said.

Poring over Chicago police records from 1870 to 1930, one researcher said she was shocked to find not a single conviction in a case of maternal filicide, the murder of children by their mother.

“Society then was much more forgiving of these women,” said Michelle Oberman, co-author of a recently published book called “Mothers Who Kill Their Children.”

“Many of them were referred to hospitals, treated and released. The immediate impulse was that a woman who was sane wouldn’t do this; she was crazy and needed help.”

In recent times, juries have remained reluctant, said Oberman, a law professor at DePaul University in Illinois.

“They find it’s too hard to lay the blame on one person in these cases,” she said. “They’re looking not just at who pulled the trigger but also at who created the environment that allowed this to happen.”

In the Caro case, a jury of 10 women and two men rejected the defense claim that she had been framed by her physician husband, Dr. Xavier Caro. Instead, they accepted the prosecution theory that Caro wanted to brutally punish her husband, who had restricted her funds and conferred with a divorce attorney. She also suspected--correctly, as it turned out--that he was having an affair with a younger woman.

Yet, even if jurors believe that Caro was driven by a thirst for vengeance, they might spare her life for a number of reasons, experts said.

“One consideration might be that she’s already paid quite a price,” said Dr. Philip Resnick, a psychiatrist recognized in the field for his landmark studies of homicidal mothers. “She has to live with the fact that she’s killed her children, and juries recognize that.”

Still, the circumstances of the crime may blunt the jury’s sympathy.

“If it’s a multiple murder, it’s more upsetting,” said Resnick, a professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. “If the children struggle and the mother is portrayed as a monster, there’s a greater risk of the death penalty.”

Caro Shot Sons at Close Range

Caro moved from one bedroom to another, shooting her sons in the head at point-blank range. Jurors heard blood-spatter experts testify that Christopher, 5, was shot once, rose up in bed and was shot again in the same spot. They also heard prosecutors claim that Caro arranged her boys’ dead bodies so they’d be face up to greet her husband when he discovered them.

Prosecutors might label such horrific acts as revenge, but in those cases where the mothers--as Caro did--also attempt suicide, they can reflect a “bizarre altruism,” Oberman said.

“Their mind-set is: ‘I can no longer parent you and you will no longer be safe in the world I’ll leave behind.’ Warped as their logic is, their sense is they want to be good mothers,” said Oberman, who with co-author Cheryl Meyer studied 200 of the roughly 1,000 mothers in the U.S. who killed their children during the 1990s.

Mothers who escape the death penalty often are portrayed in court as victims themselves--troubled women whose cries for help never were taken seriously.

That’s why a South Carolina jury chose a life sentence instead of death for Susan Smith, who drowned her two sons by rolling her car into a lake in 1994.

“I went in thinking this was the most heinous crime anyone could commit,” said juror Leroy Belue Jr. in an interview. “But I learned she had a lot of problems through her life that never were addressed. Her stepfather was sexually abusing her. She was used by men. I was hoping that in prison she’d get some kind of psychiatric help.”

Caro, too, was untreated. Her husband, an arthritis specialist, diagnosed her with depression and prescribed Prozac. But just a month before the killings, she sat on the edge of her bed, stared down the barrel of her gun and told a friend on the telephone that everyone would be better off if she were dead, the friend testified.

The successful defense for a woman at death row’s door often entails portraying her as “fragile, porcelain and easily misled,” said Streib, who has conferred with defense attorneys in such cases. “It’s the opposite image of a strong, self-assured person who’s perfectly proud of what she is.”

For their part, prosecutors try to cast a mother who kills as less than human.

“They talk about monsters and mad dogs,” Streib said. “They dematernalize her: ‘She’s not a real mother, because she killed her children. If this were a man, he’d be a mad dog and you’d put him out of his misery.’ ”

The mothers now on death row in Chowchilla include:

* Sandi Nieves, who set fire to her Santa Clarita home in 1998 and forced her children to stay inside. Her four daughters died. Like Caro, she claimed to have no memory of that tragic night. A defense psychiatrist claimed she was in a “disassociative state” and did not know what she was doing.

* Susan Eubanks, who shot her four sons in 1997 while in a drunken rage after a fight with her boyfriend at an Escondido bar. Afterward, Eubanks, who never denied the killings, shot herself in the stomach.

* Dora Buenrostro, who stabbed her two young daughters and a son in the neck at their Riverside County home in 1994. Prosecutors said she showed less emotion than the officers who found the children’s bodies.

* Caroline Young, 49, who slit the throat of her grandson, 6, and stabbed her granddaughter, 4, in the heart as she was about to lose custody of the boy to his father. She then slashed herself in the abdomen nearly a dozen times. An Alameda County jury rejected her insanity plea in 1995.

Reaction of Jury Is Unpredictable

Like Caro, these women were said to be getting even with the men in their lives. But only Caro was a doctor’s wife living in a million-dollar Santa Rosa Valley house, a Mediterranean-style villa packed with antique dolls, overstuffed pillows and decorator touches.

Will Caro’s upper-middle class status make it tougher for jurors to hand her the death penalty? Will her politeness on the witness stand be seen as a show of decency or as a display of cunning? Will her attempt to blame her husband be viewed as coldhearted or will it generate enough sympathy to spell the difference between life and death?

Nobody can predict.

Experts are also uncertain whether a jury dominated by women would be more or less likely to sentence a mother to death.

“Men are more readily sympathetic to the idea that mothering can be difficult and overwhelming,” Oberman said.

On the other hand, the jury may share the skittishness of Clinton T. Duffy, the San Quentin warden who arranged Juanita Spinelli’s trip to the gas chamber in 1941.

In his memoir, Duffy wrote that Spinelli, an ex-wrestler who ran a Bay Area robbery gang, had drugged a suspected squealer and helped drown him in the Sacramento River.

“The Duchess was a hag, evil as a witch, horrible to look at, impossible to like,” Duffy wrote, “but she was still a woman, and I dreaded the thought of ordering her execution.”