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A 32-year-old woman convicted of drowning her 2-month-old daughter in a bathtub in Santa Ana won the right to a new trial Thursday.
The Fourth District Court of Appeal ruled there was an error in jury instructions during Lucero Carrera’s trial. The court did not find fault with Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals for not giving a particular jury instruction, but the defense attorney’s failure to request it was an error that proved prejudicial, the justices ruled.
“We conclude the court had no duty to give this instruction” on Carrera’s “mental impairment” before jurors were about to deliberate on the first-degree murder charge, according to the ruling.
“However, counsel’s failure to request it after presenting expert testimony about Carrera’s mental impairment constitutes prejudicial ineffective assistance of counsel and reversible error,” the justices ruled.
The justices noted that jurors sent a note to the judge asking if they should consider the defendant’s state of mind when determining her guilt. The jury instruction that the panel did not receive “would have told the jury it could consider evidence of Carrera’s mental impairment to determine whether she had actually formed the specific intent required for premeditated murder.”
After jurors found Carrera guilty of first-degree murder and child assault causing death, the trial entered a second phase in which the panel had to consider whether she was legally insane at the time of the killing. If yes, then she would have been sentenced to a state mental health facility indefinitely instead of prison.
Carrera was convicted in January of 2015 of drowning her daughter, Kimberly Gutierrez, in a whirlpool bath in a trailer park at 518 S. Sullivan St. on June 29, 2012. She was sentenced in March 2015 to 25 years to life in prison.
Carrera was born in Mexico and came to the United States as a toddler, but was sent back to Mexico when she was 7 because she was “unstable,” defense attorney Kira Rubin said. Carrera returned to the United States when she was a teenager and at 15 years old was first hospitalized for a suicide attempt, her attorney said.
Experts said Carrera, who alternates between manic and passive phases, has a schizo-affective disorder, according to Rubin, who said one expert concluded Carrera suffered from “altruistic filicide,” leading her to kill her child.
“In her opinion, Ms. Carrera felt morally compelled to stop her daughter’s suffering,” Rubin told the jury.
Carrera appeared “catatonic” when police and paramedics began investigating the death of her daughter, Rubin said. She had swallowed a bottle of Seroquel pills in a suicide attempt, according to Rubin.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Jim Mendelson argued the defendant would sometimes fake symptoms of her mental illness as a “Get Out of Jail Free Card.”
Carrera took about 30 Seroquel pills before she filled up the bathtub and plunged her daughter into the water, Mendelson said.
–City News Service
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