Jan. 19
CALIFORNIA----execution
California Executes Confessed Murderer
Last-minute court appeals rejected and clemency vigorously denied by the
governor, Donald Beardslee was executed early this morning, 24 years after
he confessed to the slayings of 2 Bay Area women.
As about 300 opponents of the death penalty held a vigil outside the
prison, Beardslee, 61, was strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal
cocktail of drugs.
In an extraordinarily detailed statement Tuesday, Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger said: "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."
Shortly after the governor's rejection, the U.S. Supreme Court without
comment denied Beardslee's application for a stay. The decisions cleared
the way for Beardslee's execution at 12:01 this morning, the state's 11th
execution since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978 and the 1st
under the Schwarzenegger administration.
Among those gathered to witness the execution on San Quentin's death row
were 4 family members of Patty Geddling, 23, and Stacey Benjamin, 19, whom
Beardslee admitted killing and dumping in secluded spots after a dispute
over a $185 drug deal in Redwood City, Calif.
At a state clemency hearing in Sacramento on Friday, defense attorneys
asked Schwarzenegger for mercy in the case, saying that Beardslee suffered
from previously undetected brain damage that caused him to commit the two
1981 murders as well as the fatal stabbing of a Missouri woman in 1969 for
which he served 7 years in prison.
Hoping that Schwarzenegger would take a cue from the late Ronald Reagan,
the last California governor to grant clemency to a condemned man, the
attorneys asked that Beardslee be allowed to undergo a sophisticated
magnetic resonance imaging brain scan not used during his trial. In a 1967
case, Reagan commuted the death sentence of a brain-damaged convicted
killer because the latest scientific test, the 16-channel encephalograph,
had not been available at the time of trial.
But Schwarzenegger rejected the brain damage theory, noting that Beardslee
functions at a very high level, earning "A's, Bs and Cs when he attended
the College of San Mateo while he was on parole for the Missouri murder."
After spending the weekend reviewing the case and the sealed
recommendation of the state Board of Prison Terms, Schwarzenegger denied
clemency for Beardslee, just as he did last year in the only other death
case he has faced since taking office.
Last February, Schwarzenegger ignored appeals from a prominent chorus of
American and international voices - including some in the movie business -
and rejected clemency for escaped convict Kevin Cooper. Cooper was
sentenced to death for the 1983 hacking deaths of 3 Chino Hills family
members and a neighborhood friend during his flight from prison.
Cooper was later spared from execution by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of
Appeals, which sent the case back to lower courts to consider new DNA
tests.
Because of the relative leniency he has demonstrated in parole cases -
particularly compared with his Democratic predecessor Gray Davis -
Schwarzenegger's early dealings in capital cases are being watched closely
by the state's prosecutors and defense lawyers.
In interviews, Schwarzenegger said he believes in the death penalty as "a
necessary and effective deterrent to capital crimes." However, Legal
Affairs Secretary Peter Siggins said in a February interview that the
governor has indicated he would grant clemency if the right case came
along.
"He's certainly indicated that in the right case he'd be willing to
entertain" clemency, said Siggins, who added: "I can tell you the governor
is a supporter of the death penalty and believes it's an appropriate form
of punishment."
Since taking office in November 2003, Schwarzenegger has granted three
pardons and issued the 1st commutation of a prison term by a California
governor since Jerry Brown.
California leads the nation with 640 inmates on death row, but ranks 18th
in executions performed since 1976. Texas ranks 1st in executions with
337, and 2nd in inmates on death row, with 455 sentenced to death.
Because of the complicated appeals process, condemned California prisoners
wait an average of more than 20 years between the date of sentencing and
execution. In fact, most inmates on the state's death row die of natural
causes. Next in line for execution after Beardslee is Blufford Hayes Jr.,
whose 1980 death sentence is under appeal.
In the nearly quarter-century that he waited in San Mateo County Jail and
on San Quentin's death row, Beardslee is reported to have become a model
prisoner. According to testimony read at Friday's clemency hearing, he
even assisted corrections officials on prison security.
Former San Quentin Warden Daniel Vasquez described Beardslee as a rare
inmate with no discipline record. "Killing him would be a shame," Vasquez
said.
But Schwarzenegger was not swayed by the good behavior argument. "I expect
no less," he said.
The last-minute call for mercy was also countered by emotional testimony
from the families of the 2 Bay Area women, including Geddling's grown
children.
"I don't know what problem [Beardslee] has with women. He seems to like to
kill them," said Tom Amundson, Benjamin's older stepbrother.
In 1969, when he was 26, Beardslee killed a 52-year-old woman he met in a
St. Louis bar, stabbing her in the throat with a knife and leaving her in
a bathtub to bleed to death. After serving 7 years of an 18-year sentence
in that killing, the former Air Force mechanic moved to California to be
near his mother.
While on parole, Beardslee got a job as a machinist for Hewlett-Packard,
where he got consistently good job evaluations.
In 1981, Beardslee picked up a hitchhiker, Rickie Soria, a drug addict and
prostitute. Moving in with Beardslee, Soria introduced him to her friends.
One of them, 19-year-old Bill Forrester, claimed that he had been ripped
off in a $185 drug deal involving Geddling and Benjamin. Frank Rutherford,
a drug dealer portrayed as the group's ringleader, devised a scheme to
entice Geddling and Benjamin to Beardslee's apartment on April 24, 1981.
The day before, Beardslee sent Soria to buy duct tape to tie the women's
hands when they arrived.
After Rutherford accidentally wounded Geddling, Beardslee, Soria and
Forrester drove her to a remote site in San Mateo County, where Beardslee
shot the young mother twice in the head with a sawed-off shotgun.
The next day, Beardslee, Soria and Rutherford, who had remained with
Benjamin, used cocaine as they drove the Pacifica native 100 miles to a
secluded area in Lake County, north of San Francisco. After the 2 men
failed to strangle Benjamin with a wire garrote, Beardslee slit her throat
with Rutherford's knife. Before leaving the body, the 2 men pulled down
Benjamin's pants to make it appear that she had been raped.
Police tracked down Beardslee using a phone number found at one of the
crime scenes. As he had in St. Louis, Beardslee quickly confessed to the
crimes and was the lead witness in the trials. Rutherford, who died in
prison two years ago, and Soria were given long prison terms, and
Forrester was acquitted.
Tried last, Beardslee was convicted and, after extensive jury
deliberations, sentenced to die in San Quentin's gas chamber. The method
of execution in California was later changed to death by lethal injection.
(source: Los Angeles Times)
*******************
A witness's account of Beardslee's execution
Donald Beardslee's execution at San Quentin Prison Wednesday morning was a
struggle for dignity.
The 5 guards who labored 16 minutes to insert the lethal injection needles
into his arms struggled for composure, their lips tightening as they
undoubtedly realized this was taking twice as long as usual.
The 30 witnesses gathered in the observation room to watch through the
thick glass of the apple-green death chamber struggled to keep their cool
as the minutes dragged on, shifting uncomfortably on their feet, crossing
and uncrossing their arms. Nervous coughs were the only sounds breaking
the tension.
And there, being put to death before all of us, the 61-year-old Beardslee
seemed to struggle - ever so slightly.
Once, as the triple-murderer was being led into the death chamber at 11:58
p.m. Tuesday by 5 prison guards, a look of concern or possibly worry
flickered across his face. It was quickly replaced by a flatness of
expression - and when he was strapped by his ankles, chest and arms to the
hospital-style gurney, he closed his eyes and lay so still he seemed
asleep.
He never moved while the prison guards hunted for the right openings in
his flesh from midnight to 12:16 a.m. Wednesday. But after the intravenous
lines were finally taped to each arm and he was left alone to await the
poisons that would end his life, he let his emotions leak one more time.
Beardslee's chest heaved two quick sighs at 12:18 a.m. -- the same minute
unseen hands from behind the death chamber walls began to send chemicals
through the plastic tubes toward his body -- as if to say, "OK, let's get
on with it."
Beardslee's eyelids then fluttered open a brief moment, and two minutes
later he yawned and smacked his lips twice. But from then on, the
execution went just as it has for the previous nine lethal injections
since 1996: His face turned from red to a deep, grayish blue, the
breathing gradually stopped, and he didn't seem to twitch a muscle.
At 12:29 it was over. That was one minute shorter than it took in 2002 for
the last man put to death at San Quentin by lethal injection, Stephen
Wayne Anderson -- but about double the execution time for most of the
others.
For those of us who watched, meanwhile, the minutes crawled by with no way
to tell when they would end.
There were 17 other witnesses -- in addition to the 13 of us from the
press -- in the stuffy, sterile-smelling observation room Wednesday, and
from one end of the room to the other the tension seemed to build like a
dark cloud. Nobody said a word; they weren't allowed to. But their actions
betrayed them.
Along the far wall from us, a woman in a red coat kept her arms folded
tightly to her chest, uncrossing them just once when she clasped her hands
before her face, as if in prayer. Next to her, a woman in frizzy black
hair bit her lip, folded her arms too, and then unfolded them to clench
her hands tightly at her waist. Halfway through the execution she fiercely
pressed a knuckle into her mouth.
At the end, after a prison guard announced that Beardslee had died and we
from the media were being led out, the woman in frizzy black hair suddenly
doubled over, fists at her mouth, gasping.
It was all done in near-utter silence, broken only occasionally by a
nervous cough -- and one strange anomaly, one minute before Beardslee was
pronounced dead. That's when Daily Journal reporter Michelle Durand
fainted a little to my right from a combination of the stuffy heat and
hunger. "That's the last time I forget to eat again after breakfast," she
said sheepishly outside after she'd recovered and was gamely heading off
to file her story.
The whole affair, Durand's fainting notwhithstanding, was typical for the
5 San Quentin executions I have now witnessed -- the only exceptions being
the gassing of David Mason in 1993, when reporters were allowed to call
out what they saw as he convulsed in the chair, and the prison's 1st
lethal injection in 1996. During that execution, the mothers of some of
the 14 boys "Freeway Killer" William Bonin had raped and murdered sighed
heavily, chests heaving, as they watched their sons' killer die.
This time, the death toll of the murderer before us was far smaller than
Bonin's. But that, of course, did not mean the pain was any less for those
touched by his evil.
Beardslee throttled and slashed 19-year Stacey Benjamin and shotgunned her
friend, 23-year-old Patty Geddling, in 1981 after they were lured to his
Redwood City apartment in a beef over a drug debt. 24 years later, the
anger was stronger than ever for Benjamin's brother, T.Tom Amundsen - and
the rage radiated as he sat at the railing of the death chamber Wednesday.
Amundsen, a Marine gunnery sergeant who tells of killing enemy soldiers in
the Vietnam War, was stiff as a board while he watched his sister's killer
breathe his last. He kept his eyes focused, laserlike, on the dying man -
and only once did he turn his head, for a quick nod to the media witnesses
as they walked out the door.
"I saw what I wanted to see. I'm glad," he told me shortly after the
execution. "He was awful. He deserved to die."
Lying there on the gurney in his short-sleeved blue shirt and blue cotton
pants, Beardslee didn't look like a killer. But then, they never do.
Decades of near-solitary confinement in prison softens men like Beardslee,
turning their complexions pasty from too much time inside and giving them
a decorum they lacked when they went behind bars.
Back when Beardslee was caught by police, he had a wild lion's mane of
black hair, a thick beard, and eyes that stared into the camera for his
jail mugshot with scary rage. The man I saw Wednesday had neatly cropped
black hair, slicked back and turning gray at the temples, and a groomed
gray mustache. Under his silver, wire-framed glasses, he looked more like
a schoolteacher than a monster who killed two women, plus another woman
before them, in Missouri.
Maybe that is reading too much into a cosmetic appearance. But the final
moments of a man's life are telling, no matter how or where they come. And
in a San Quentin lethal injection, there isn't much to go on - just those
few moments of watching guards struggle to insert needles, victim's
survivors struggle to keep their emotions from erupting, and the killer
himself try to stay composed as he dies in a very public way.
By that measure, regardless of whether they approved or disapproved of the
death penalty, Donald Beardslee and the people who came to view his final
moments Wednesday managed to pull off their grim little event in the best
way they could hope for: With dignity.
(source: Kevin Fagan, San Francisco Chronicle)
*******************
A chill in the air amid death penalty protest --Demonstrators rally
outside San Quentin to assail execution
Braving a bitter cold wind that swept in off San Francisco Bay on Tuesday
night, more than 400 death penalty protesters gathered at the gates of San
Quentin State Prison to bear witness, at a certain remove, to the
execution of Donald Beardslee.
Speaker after speaker mounted a low wooden soapbox to shout, "They say
Death Row! We say hell no!"
Actor Mike Farrell, president of Death Penalty Focus, a California
activist organization, said that earlier Tuesday evening he had spoken
with one of Beardslee's attorneys.
Beardslee, through the attorney, told the protesters "that he wanted known
his appreciation for these people's presence," Farrell said, adding that
Beardslee "even sent his regards to the people who put the staples in the
signs."
Most of those signs advocated an end to the death penalty. But one sign,
borne by Rudy Thered, from Sacramento, said, "Bye, bye, Beardslee."
At one point, Thered threaded his way up to the speaker's stand,
apparently trying to get on TV, but protesters bearing signs reading "End
the Death Penalty" surrounded him and his sign, and for a few minutes,
they jostled each other.
As people stamped their feet in an effort to keep warm, Point San Quentin
Village resident Frances Barbour Hayden, whose house is a few feet from
the prison gates, brewed up a pot of tea, grabbed some cups and went
outside to help the protesters warm up.
She said she was doing this as a salute to people "who have come a long
way to exercise their freedom of speech."
Earlier in the evening before most of the protesters arrived, Steven
Blair, a retired teacher of ancient history, walked briskly through the
chill Marin air and down the main street of San Quentin village to join
about half a dozen protesters.
He and the other demonstrators were at the prison for one simple reason,
perhaps best explained by the 61-year-old Blair:
"My being here has nothing to do with what's his name and the 2 gals he
murdered, and I have the utmost sympathy for their families," he said.
"This is all about us. We're doing it. We're killing this guy. It's a
revenge killing, and we're in the last remnant of a barbarous time. This
is pre-civilized behavior."
The few who gathered together early in the evening said they have been
against the death penalty for decades and that coming to San Quentin's
gates, where they were outnumbered about 5 to 1 by newspeople, was a way
of getting their message across.
"We know the early news (shows) need a visual, so that's why we get here
early," said Joan Juster, 51, of San Francisco, as she held a sign saying,
"Execute Justice, Not People."
"If you feel strongly about an issue, you should take to the streets and
let people know."
(source: San Francisco Chronicle)
CONNECTICUT:
Death penalty opponents begin campaign
About 40 antideath penalty activists were stalking the halls of the state
Capitol and the Legislative Office Building Tuesday on the lookout for
lawmakers they could talk to about repeal of capital punishment.
The lobbying campaign was also directed at Gov. M. Jodi Rell, part of a
final effort to convince her to issue a reprieve to confessed serial
killer Michael Ross, who is scheduled to die by lethal injection next
week.
Rell has refused to issue a reprieve and warned she would veto any repeal
of capital punishment.
Organizers with the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty
warned their supporters that it is going to be difficult to convince a
reluctant General Assembly to act quickly on any repeal legislation,
particularly in the face Rells veto threat.
One problem, they said, is that many legislators and most members of the
public have no sympathy at all for Ross because of the hideous nature of
his rape-murders.
"Unfortunately, his crimes have colored the issue," said Kim Harrison, a
lobbyist for the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ and
a member of the anti-death penalty group.
Harrison was briefing a group of volunteers before they fanned out in
search of lawmakers to lobby and she was trying hard not to be
discouraging about the prospects for swift repeal of the death penalty. "I
dont mean to be pessimistic," she said, "but people really need to get out
there and beat the bushes."
Meanwhile, Connecticuts public defenders went back to the state Supreme
Court on Tuesday to again ask for a stay of next weeks planned execution
of Ross.
The motion requests more time to allow a federal appeal of last weeks
state Supreme Court ruling that barred the Division of Public Defender
Services from intervening in the case to argue that Ross is mentally
in-competent, said Gerard Smyth, the states chief public defender.
The high court found that there was no "meaningful evidence" to support
that assertion.
No date had been set Tuesday afternoon to hear that motion.
At the Capitol event, state Sen. Mary Ann Handley, a Manchester Democrat
who is supporting the repeal effort, shrugged sadly when one of the
volunteers asked her if it might be easier to win repeal after Ross is
executed.
"I hate to think so, but realistically, that may be the case," Handley
said.
However, the volunteer lobbyists didnt appear discouraged by the dour
prospects for immediate repeal or reprieve.
"Were letting (lawmakers) know that there is a very strong contingent of
people in favor of abolishing the death penalty," said one of the
volunteer lobbyists, Sally Connolly of Woodbridge.
Connolly, a retired state employee, said she also hoped to get one simple
message through to the governor: "Enough killing."
(source: New Britain Herald)
TENNESSEE:
Former death row inmate on trial--Man facing life, with or without parole,
if guilty
Everyone in this courtroom, including the jury, knows who pulled the
trigger.
It wasn't the man sitting at the defense table, James A. Mellon.
Knox County Assistant District Attorney General Leslie Nassios argues that
fact does not wash Robert Scott Loveday's blood from Mellon's hands.
"James Mellon was the catalyst for the chain of events that culminated in
the robbery (and death) of Robert Scott Loveday," Nassios told jurors
Tuesday in Knox County Criminal Court.
Defense attorney Susan Shipley counters that there is something else that
won't wash out easily: the stench of a prosecution effort to hold Mellon
responsible for a murder Anthony "T-Bone" Jones committed.
"This case is not about letting James Mellon off the hook, but it is about
holding him responsible for what he actually did," Shipley told jurors.
"There was only one murderer that night - Anthony 'T-Bone' Jones."
Mellon is standing trial before Judge Mary Beth Leibowitz on charges of
felony murder and especially aggravated robbery in the August 1997 slaying
of Loveday at a closed convenience store on Kingston Pike near Lovell
Road.
Loveday, 20, was shot twice in the chest - all for a watch and $1.
Four men, Jones, Mellon, Ernest Leon Rodgers and David Jones, have
admitted they were at that convenience store near Farragut on the night of
the slaying. Anthony Jones has admitted he shot Loveday. All 4 have
acknowledged they were out on a robbery spree when they encountered
Loveday, who had stopped to use a pay phone.
All four had been imprisoned, but in a strange twist of circumstance,
Mellon was the only 1 of the 4 to wind up on death row.
He had been offered a deal that would have allowed him a life sentence
with the possibility of parole. But just a few months after taking the
deal, Mellon backed out, saying he was afraid of being labeled "a snitch."
Leibowitz refused to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea. In March 1999,
she held a sentencing hearing at which a jury returned a death verdict
against Mellon.
Later, Anthony Jones was allowed to plead guilty in return for a sentence
of life without parole. Deals were then struck with Rodgers and David
Jones, both of whom received 40-year sentences.
Case closed.
But, then, defense attorney Gerald Gulley took on Mellon's case in the
appellate courts. In October 2003, the state Supreme Court ruled Mellon
should have been allowed to withdraw his guilty plea.
That decision put him at the defense table Tuesday for what is expected to
be a weeklong trial.
The Knox County District Attorney General's office is no longer seeking
death, but prosecutors still want Mellon's life.
If Nassios wins a conviction for felony murder, she will ask jurors at a
separate hearing to sentence Mellon to life without parole. Shipley will
counter with a request for life with parole, a sentence that would still
require Mellon to serve at least 51 years in prison.
The trial continues today.
(source: Knoxville News Sentinel)
