On January 26, the Judicial District Court of Travis County in Austin, Texas, ordered the conditional release of Rosa Estela Jiménez, an undocumented Mexican babysitter, who had spent the last 18 years of her life in prison after being charged and convicted of the death of a toddler while in her care. She was serving a double sentence, of 99 and 75 years, respectively.
Jiménez’s case was extensively documented in the 2007 documentary film My Life Inside / Mi vida dentro by Mexican director Lucía Gaja. With unprecedented access to the courtroom, the film documented all of the inconsistencies and irregularities of Jiménez’s trial, as well as the bias against her, who was demonized as an undocumented immigrant.
My Life Inside was the winner of the Best Documentary Award at the Morelia Film Festival, and was nominated for an Ariel Award. Gajá continued to follow Jiménez’s case after the release of her film, and has been working on a second part focusing on her experiences inside the maximum-security prison and the life of the her children.
“I have followed Rosa's story since 2005. In 2011 we returned to film, because thanks to the film and the support of the State of Mexico, new lawyers were hired. A new case was filed and new pediatric witnesses were brought, which allowed for a new hearing, and Rosa's case was reopened for a time. I went back to see her, and she told me how it had been that time that we stopped seeing each other,” said Gajá in an interview published in Gaceta UNAM.
For the filmmaker, Jiménez’s story shows the way in which the United States' judicial and penitentiary system is not focused on doing justice or finding the truth behind each accusation, but rather on punishing: “The punishment of a woman for being a woman, undocumented and, from the prosecutor's perspective, ignorant. Rosa's situation represents many men and women in the same situation, there is a stigmatization of what it is to be Latin American and a migrant. Things have changed little (since 2005), let's see what happens now with Joe Biden as president, as in these days he has signed executive orders where several migrant rights have been restored.”
Jiménez’s release was made possible by the support of numerous entities, including NGO’s, local, national, and international government offices, who believe in her innocence, and have fought to show all the irregularities of her 2005 trial in order to call for a new and fair one.
As reported by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper, three pediatric specialists testified that the 21-month toddler “most likely swallowed, on his own, the compacted mass of paper towels that led to his death — and that there was no way Jimenez could have forced the wad down the boy's throat, as prosecutors argued at her 2005 trial.”
Jiménez, who is now 38 years old and with a worsening stage four kidney disease, was released ’s on bond, while her quest to be declared innocent continues. She’s also waiting to regularize her immigration status, hoping that immigration officials release her on bond as well, so she can receive medical treatment in Austin, while awaiting for a new trial. "The worst case would be to fight nearly two decades to prove your innocence, only to be transferred to an ICE detention center, which would put her life at greater risk," said defense lawyer Vanessa Potkin from the Innocence Project of New York, quoted by the Austin American-Statesman.
