Jan. 18
CALIFORNIA----imminent execution/clemency denied
Governor denies clemency for condemned killer
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency Tuesday for condemned killer
Donald Beardslee, clearing one of the final hurdles to the state's 11th
execution since it reinstated the death penalty.
"I have given serious consideration to Donald Beardslee's petition for
clemency including all supporting evidence and testimony," the governor
said in his written denial. "The state and federal courts have affirmed
his conviction and death sentence, and nothing in his petition or the
record of his case convinces me that he did not understand the gravity of
his actions or that these heinous murders were wrong.
"I do not believe the evidence presented warrants the exercise of clemency
in this case."
Beardslee, convicted of killing 2 women in 1981, is scheduled to die by
lethal injection at one minute past midnight.
He has two appeals pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. They include
claims that the lethal injection he is due to receive at San Quentin State
Prison constitutes cruel-and-unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth
Amendment, and that jurors were unfairly influenced when they rendered a
death verdict for the 1981 murders of 2 Northern California women.
In his clemency petition, Beardslee's lawyers claimed he suffers from
brain maladies that prevented him from thinking clearly when he killed
Stacey Benjamin, 19, and Patty Geddling, 23, after the pair were lured to
his Redwood City apartment to avenge a soured $185 drug deal.
Prosecutors have said Beardslee, a Redwood City machinist who was on
parole for murdering a Missouri woman, was not a passive, unwitting dupe
when he committed the murders, as his lawyers claimed.
They urged Schwarzenegger not to commute the death sentence to life
without parole, claiming Beardslee helped with the murder plot and sent
his roommate to get duct tape to bind the victims before they even arrived
at his apartment.
"We are not dealing here with a man who is so generally affected by his
impairment that he cannot tell the difference between right and wrong,"
Schwarzenegger said in his denial.
(source: Associated Press)
