Jan. 18
Schwarzenegger Denies Clemency to Convicted Murderer Donald Beardslee
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued the following statement today
following his decision not to grant clemency to convicted murderer Donald
Beardslee:
"I have given serious consideration to Donald Beardslee's petition for
clemency including all supporting evidence and testimony. 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."
The full text of the Governor's decision is below and attached. Also
attached is the full text of the Board of Prison Term's recommendation to
the Governor in this case.
STATEMENT OF DECISION
Request for Clemency by Mr. Donald J. Beardslee
Mr. Donald J. Beardslee was convicted by a jury of two counts of first
degree murder and sentenced to death. He is scheduled to be executed for
one of these murders on January 19, 2005. These are not the first killings
Beardslee has committed.
In December of 1969, Beardslee met Laura Griffin in a Missouri bar and
accompanied her to her home. After they arrived, he strangled Ms. Griffin
with his hands, held her head underwater in the bathtub, and stabbed her
in the throat. He later confessed to the killing and pled guilty to
second-degree murder. After serving 7 years in a Missouri penitentiary, he
was paroled in 1977 to California.
Four years later, Beardslee was still on parole for the Missouri murder
and was living in a Redwood City apartment. On April 24, 1981, he returned
home from work and discovered his roommate, Ricki Soria, and a few of her
friends making plans to harm 19-year-old Stacy Benjamin over a
drug-related monetary dispute. This group, consisting of Soria, William
Forrester, and Frank Rutherford, planned to lure Ms. Benjamin to
Beardslee's apartment and then force her to give them the money.
While Soria, Forrester, and Beardslee were waiting at the apartment for
the two women to arrive, Rutherford tied a piece of wire to some shotgun
shells, fashioning a garrote. Ms. Benjamin and her friend Patty Geddling
then arrived, and Beardslee answered the door. Once the women were inside
the apartment, Beardslee closed the door, and Rutherford fired a
double-barreled sawed-off shotgun, striking and wounding Ms. Geddling in
the shoulder.
Eventually, Beardslee put Ms. Geddling into a van driven by Forrester and
told her they were taking her to a hospital. Soria followed them in
Beardslee's car. Instead of stopping at a hospital, the 2 vehicles drove
south along the California coast until Beardslee told Forrester to turn
off the main road. After coming to a stop, the men exited the van and
Beardslee retrieved and loaded the sawed-off shotgun and handed it to
Forrester. Ms. Geddling pleaded for her life, but Forrester shot her
twice. Beardslee then reloaded the gun and shot Ms. Geddling two more
times. Forensic evidence showed that Beardslee shot Ms. Geddling in the
head and that his shots actually killed her.
The trio left Ms. Geddling's body in a ditch and fled the area, Soria
driving the van and Beardslee driving his car. When the van ran out of
gas, the threesome abandoned the vehicle, wiped it clean of fingerprints,
and returned to Redwood City in Beardslee's car.
Beardslee and Soria later dropped Forrester at another location and
traveled to a different apartment where Ms. Benjamin was being held.
Shortly thereafter, Beardslee, Rutherford, Soria, and Ms. Benjamin got
into Beardslee's car and drove north to Pacifica. All of them used cocaine
while they were in transit.
Once the foursome crossed the Golden Gate bridge, they continued north to
Lake County and stopped on a deserted road. Rutherford coaxed Ms. Benjamin
from the car, and Beardslee and Soria wandered away from the vehicle.
After walking a short distance, Beardslee turned back and found Rutherford
strangling Ms. Benjamin with a wire. He thought he noticed a "pleading
look" on her face, so he punched her in the temple. He then took one end
of the wire from Rutherford and pulled on it. When the wire broke,
Beardslee asked Rutherford for his knife, and used it to cut Ms.
Benjamin's throat. Forensic evidence showed that Ms. Benjamin died from
the knife wound.
Beardslee was arrested by police several days after the murders. A jury,
after hearing the evidence, found him guilty of murdering both young
women. Following the two first-degree murder convictions, a jury returned
a death verdict for the killing of Patty Geddling. To date, all state and
federal courts have affirmed Beardslee's conviction and death sentence.
With the assistance of his attorneys, Beardslee has appealed to me for an
act of executive clemency. He is asking that I exercise my power under
Article V, section 8(a), of the California Constitution to commute his
sentence of death to one of life in prison without the possibility of
parole.
Beardslee advances several reasons why his life should be spared. He
argues that death is an unjustly severe punishment when his role in these
crimes is compared to his associates. However, Beardslee was the only one
of the accomplices with a prior murder conviction. In fact, he was on
parole for this prior murder when he committed the grisly and senseless
killings of Patty Geddling and Stacy Benjamin. He was also the only of the
partners in crime who administered the coup de grace to each of the
murdered women. Given these facts, I cannot disturb the jury's penalty of
death on this basis.
Beardslee also argues that his model behavior for years in prison warrants
mercy. While I commend Beardslee for his prison record and his ability to
conform his behavior to meet or exceed expected prison norms, I am not
moved to mercy by the fact that Beardslee has been a model prisoner. I
expect no less.
Finally, and most significantly, Beardslee argues that his life should be
spared because his criminal acts were performed as a result of his being
in a dissociative state at the time of the crime due to long-standing
mental impairments that compromised his executive functioning and judgment
when he was under extreme stress. Beardslee claims that the stress of the
fatal events of the evening of April 24, 1981, interfered with his ability
to make reasoned decisions, rendered him unable to process emotions, and
caused him to dissociate from events into some kind of fugue state. This
claim warrants more extensive discussion.
The evidence supporting Beardslee's application suggests that he suffers
from a mental impairment that has resulted-at least in part-from serious
injuries he sustained prior to the murders. There is also some reason to
believe that some of his mental impairment has existed since birth. But 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. We
also are not dealing with a claim that Beardslee's mental condition has
resulted in subaverage intellectual functioning or impairments in his
adaptive skills of everyday living. That is not the case.
Beardslee can function at a very high level. In fact, the expert
neuropsychologist retained by his lawyers in connection with these
clemency proceedings stated at the Board's hearing that in many areas
Beardslee performs quite a bit better than the average person. His reading
and comprehension scores are good. He got B's and C's in high school He
had a good personnel record in the Air Force where he was a jet engine
mechanic. He earned A's, B's and C's when he attended the College of San
Mateo while he was on parole for the Missouri murder. He had a good work
history at Hewlett Packard where he was employed as a fabricator. Over the
course of his life, Beardslee has been employed as a machine operator,
machine set-up man, apprentice machinist, and employment counselor. He
also did a good job in all of his prison work assignments in both Missouri
and California. Indeed his prison behavior has been described as
exemplary.
The question for me is whether Beardslee acted in a dissociative state due
to mental impairments when he murdered two women in the course of the
horrific events that transpired on April 24, 1981. And, if so, whether
that fact sufficiently impeded his comprehension of the heinous nature of
his crimes such that it inspires in me mercy compelling enough to set
aside the jury's sentence and commute death to life in prison without
parole.
It seems consistently reported that on the evening of April 24, 1981, Mr.
Beardslee showed little or no emotion once Ms. Geddling was shot when she
entered his apartment. In fact, many observers have reported that
Beardslee has had such a flattened affect for much of his life. It is
argued that this lack of emotion is a symptom and byproduct of his mental
deficiency. That may be. But in and of itself, the fact that Beardslee had
a flat affect the evening of April 24, 1981, does not have persuasive
value that he acted on "autopilot" that evening and had no capacity to
make reasoned decisions. This is especially true when one understands that
this flattened affect is usually present in his personality.
Moreover, the argument that Beardslee acted in some sort of dissociated
fugue state is not clearly supported by his actions or his numerous
accounts of the events of that horrible night. On the afternoon of the
murders, Beardslee agreed with the other participants that Ms. Geddling
and Ms. Benjamin would be taught a lesson that evening in Beardslee's
apartment. Beardslee drove to pick up one of the participants, Rutherford,
and brought him back to the apartment. [Frank Rutherford by all accounts
appears to be the evil protagonist in this tragedy. He was sentenced to
life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of Stacy
Benjamin. He died in prison.] Rutherford brought with him the shotgun.
Beardslee directed another accomplice to go out and buy tape that could be
used to bind and gag the victims.
After the women arrived at Beardslee's apartment and Ms. Geddling was
shot, Beardslee explained to an inquiring landlord that the noise he heard
was a firecracker that Beardslee intended to throw out the door but
missed. Of the murder of Patty Geddling, in his confession Beardslee says
he was committed to murdering her "from the first". After her murder, in
addition to wiping down the abandoned van for fingerprints before they
again met up with Rutherford, Beardslee and Soria vacuumed his car at a
San Mateo car wash. Beardslee also disposed of the empty shotgun casings
in a bay slough where they would not be found. Later, after the pair
joined up with Rutherford and murdered Stacy Benjamin, Beardslee pulled
the dead women's pants down in an effort to make it appear she was
sexually assaulted. The day after the murders, he continued to clean his
apartment and replaced cushions on his living room couch that had blood on
them. These actions show Beardslee's consciousness of guilt and the nature
and consequences of the murders he committed.
Looking back in time to the state of Beardslee's mind on April 24, 1981,
his counsel urge that I grant a reprieve to allow him to be administered a
Magnetic Resonance Imaging or similar examination. But such a diagnostic
tool is only a "snapshot" of a person's brain at a particular time, and it
is questionable that such an examination would reveal information that
could reliably form the basis for an appraisal of the condition of
Beardslee's brain more than 23 years ago. Moreover, while such a
diagnostic tool may show anatomic injury to Beardslee's brain, the injury
may not tell us anything about his behavior. [Ruben C. Gur, Andrew J.
Sakin, and Raquel E. Gur, Neuropsychological Assessment in Psychiatric
Research and Practice, in Robert Michaels, ed., PSYCHIATRY, revised
edition -- 1991 (Philadelphia: J. P. Lippincott Company, 1991), ch. 72,
pp. 1-16, at pp. 5-6.] Finally, records of the interview of Beardslee
performed by the neuropsychologist retained on his behalf in connection
with his clemency application do not appear to be comprehensive.
The extent of Beardslee's involvement and action in the murders of each of
the young women, and perhaps more significantly his recollection and
after-the-fact recounting of these events to police, make it hard for me
to accept that Beardslee was dissociated and disconnected from the events
of that fateful night. From a review of the events and Beardslee's actions
following them, there is no question in my mind that at the time Beardslee
committed the murders he knew what he was doing-and he knew it was wrong.
Nothing in Beardslee's application, supporting papers, or testimony on his
behalf before the Board convinces me that he did not understand that he
committed 2 grisly murders and that his decision to take those actions was
wrong. Clemency is not designed to undo the considered judgment of the
people in favor of the death penalty, but to prevent the miscarriage of
justice.
The Board of Prison Terms unanimously recommended that I deny clemency to
Beardslee. A copy of their recommendation is attached to this decision.
After my own independent study and analysis, I agree with the Board.
Although I have given serious consideration to Beardslee's plea for mercy,
I do not believe the evidence presented warrants the exercise of clemency
in this case. For this reason, Donald J. Beardslee's application for
clemency is denied.
(source: GOVERNOR ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA 95814
(916) 445-2841)
*************************
Schwarzenegger OKs First Calif. Execution in Years
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declined on Tuesday to grant
clemency to killer Donald Beardslee, setting the stage for the 1st
execution in three years in the most populous U.S. state.
Beardslee, 61, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at San
Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco at one minute after midnight
(3:01 a.m. EST) on Wednesday morning for killing two women in 1981.
Beardslee's attorneys have argued that he was duped by accomplices and was
suffering from mental illness aggravated by brain injuries when he shot
Stacey Benjamin, 19, and choked and slashed the throat of Patty Geddling,
23, in California.
The Air Force veteran, who was out on parole at the time for a 1969 murder
of a young woman in Missouri, confessed to both killings and was sentenced
to death in 1984.
"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," Schwarzenegger said in a statement. "I do not
believe the evidence presented warrants the exercise of clemency in this
case."
California has the largest death row population in the United States and
perhaps the world, but it rarely administers the ultimate punishment.
Lengthy appeals typically lead to two decades of delay before an inmate is
executed.
Beardslee would become the 11th inmate executed since California restored
the death penalty in 1978. He is one of 640 people on California's death
row, the largest in the nation. Texas is 2nd with 455.
Beardslee's attorneys had asked the governor to commute his sentence to
life in prison without parole.
They have also challenged Beardslee's sentence to the Supreme Court,
arguing that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment and that
jurors were unfairly influenced in reaching a death verdict.
Beardslee declined the state's offer of a last meal of his choice on
Tuesday, a prison official said. He is set to die by lethal injection of
three chemicals, including potassium chloride, which causes cardiac
arrest.
Last year Schwarzenegger rejected the only other clemency petition made to
him from a death row inmate, Kevin Cooper, who was convicted of murdering
4 people in southern California. The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
in San Francisco granted Cooper an 11th-hour reprieve and ordered new
evidence tests.
Republican Ronald Reagan, in 1967, was the last California governor to
grant clemency to a death row inmate.
(source: Reuters)
