[python] Python: Maximum recursion depth exceeded

I have the following recursion code, at each node I call sql query to get the nodes belong to the parent node.

here is the error:

Exception RuntimeError: 'maximum recursion depth exceeded' in <bound method DictCursor.__del__ of <MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor object at 0x879768c>> ignored

RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded while calling a Python object
Exception AttributeError: "'DictCursor' object has no attribute 'connection'" in <bound method DictCursor.__del__ of <MySQLdb.cursors.DictCursor object at 0x879776c>> ignored

Method that I call to get sql results:

def returnCategoryQuery(query, variables={}):
    cursor = db.cursor(cursors.DictCursor);
    catResults = [];
    try:
        cursor.execute(query, variables);
        for categoryRow in cursor.fetchall():
            catResults.append(categoryRow['cl_to']);
        return catResults;
    except Exception, e:
        traceback.print_exc();

I actually don't have any issue with the above method but I put it anyways to give proper overview of the question.

Recursion Code:

def leaves(first, path=[]):
    if first:
        for elem in first:
            if elem.lower() != 'someString'.lower():
                if elem not in path:
                    queryVariable = {'title': elem}
                    for sublist in leaves(returnCategoryQuery(categoryQuery, variables=queryVariable)):
                        path.append(sublist)
                        yield sublist
                    yield elem

Calling the recursive function

for key, value in idTitleDictionary.iteritems():
    for startCategory in value[0]:
        print startCategory + " ==== Start Category";
        categoryResults = [];
        try:
            categoryRow = "";
            baseCategoryTree[startCategory] = [];
            #print categoryQuery % {'title': startCategory};
            cursor.execute(categoryQuery, {'title': startCategory});
            done = False;
            while not done:
                categoryRow = cursor.fetchone();
                if not categoryRow:
                    done = True;
                    continue;
                rowValue = categoryRow['cl_to'];
                categoryResults.append(rowValue);
        except Exception, e:
            traceback.print_exc();
        try:
            print "Printing depth " + str(depth);
            baseCategoryTree[startCategory].append(leaves(categoryResults))
        except Exception, e:
            traceback.print_exc();

Code to print the dictionary,

print "---Printing-------"
for key, value in baseCategoryTree.iteritems():
    print key,
    for elem in value[0]:
        print elem + ',';
    raw_input("Press Enter to continue...")
    print

If the recursion is too deep I should be getting the error when I call my recursion function, but when I get this error when I print the dictionary.