[HPN] State of Texas murders battered woman

[Graeme Bacque]

http://dailynews.netscape.com/dailynews/cnn/beets.execution.02.0224.tmpl

Texas executes Betty Lou Beets for husband's murder

HUNTSVILLE, Texas-- Despite her pleas that she was a battered spouse who 
killed in self defense, 62-year-old Betty Lou Beets was executed Thursday 
night by the state of Texas.

Beets, who was convicted of murdering her fifth husband in 1983 to collect 
his life insurance and pension, was put to death by lethal injection at 
6:18 p.m. CST at a state prison known as The Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas.

She did not make a final statement.

A reporter who witnessed the execution said Beets "seemed to die 
peacefully" with almost a smile on her face, dressed in prison whites and 
with the chaplain by her side.

Beets' attorneys exhausted their last legal recourse about an hour before 
the execution, when Gov. George W. Bush declined to stop it.

Under Texas law, Bush could have granted Beets a one-time 30-day reprieve. 
He decided instead to follow the recommendation of his 18-member Board of 
Pardons and Paroles and let the execution take place. Bush has never gone 
against the board's recommendation.

His decision came just minutes after the U.S. Supreme Court declined a 
request by Beets' attorneys to step into the case.
"She's very scared," Beets' attorney Joe Margulies had told CNN earlier in 
the day. "She doesn't want to be strapped down to that gurney all alone."

A federal appeals court on Thursday afternoon denied a motion to stop the 
execution. In its ruling, the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New 
Orleans upheld a lower court ruling issued Wednesday rejecting a plea from 
Beets' attorneys that her case be re-examined by Texas officials because 
she was a battered wife.

Beets is only the fourth woman executed in the United States since the 
Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976. Karla Faye 
Tucker was the first woman executed in Texas since the Civil War, when she 
was put to death on February 3, 1998, for a 1983 pickax murder.

Beets, who had five children, nine grandchildren and six 
great-grandchildren, is the oldest person put to death in Texas since the 
state resumed executions in 1982.

Texas, which leads the nation in capital punishment, has now executed 208 
people since then.

Beets was convicted of murder for the 1983 shooting death of Dallas fire 
captain Jimmy Don Beets, her fifth husband, in what prosecutors said was a 
scheme to collect his life insurance and pension.

She also had been convicted of shooting and wounding her second husband, 
and charged -- but never tried -- in the 1981 shooting death of her fourth 
husband.

In Austin, U.S. District Judge James Nowlin said the motion to stop the 
execution, filed as part of a lawsuit seeking to have Beets' case reviewed 
because she was a battered wife, was "yet another example of a prisoner 
attempting to delay execution just prior to the execution date."

The judge also dismissed the lawsuit, which argued that Beets' civil rights 
were violated because she was not given a chance to present evidence that 
she suffered years of domestic abuse in her five marriages.

On Tuesday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, dominated by Bush 
appointees, rejected Beets' pleas for a 180-day reprieve and commutation of 
her sentence.
	
Beets' legal team and a coalition of supporters including domestic-violence 
awareness groups and Amnesty International USA wanted her death sentence 
commuted to life in prison.

They said Beets, who has been in jail since 1985, was damaged both 
physically and psychologically and that she had poor legal counsel because 
the jury that sentenced her to die was not told about the abuse.

"Betty's daughters went to (a previous defense attorney) ... and gave him 
pictures of Betty taken after she had been beaten up, horribly battered," 
Margulies said. "Had he looked, he could have amassed the information that 
we eventually got ... and asked the (parole) board to review, but they 
declined.

"What we're saying is, 'Give us the opportunity to present our evidence on 
battering that the jury didn't hear.'"

Beets' daughter, Faye Lane, told the parole board Tuesday: "All my mama's 
life, she's been abused. I've seen it with my own eyes. And I know that if 
the jury heard the truth about my mama, she only could have done something 
like this if she'd been very scared or threatened.

"I'm not saying that my mother should go free, but to be allowed to live 
out her remaining years in prison."
Letters to Bush

Two U.N. experts on human rights had appealed to Bush in a letter Thursday 
to spare Beets from execution.

Asma Jahangir and Radhika Coomaraswamy of the U.N. Commission on Human 
rights expressed their concern that "abuse and extreme violence" suffered 
by Beets were not considered by the investigating authorities or the courts 
when convicting and sentencing her for murder.

The two U.N. officials urged Bush to consider the specific circumstances of 
the crime, "and in particular the violent abuse which Betty Lou Beets 
suffered at the hands of her spouses and the effect of this abuse on her 
state of mind and her actions."

In another letter Wednesday, the group Human Rights Watch had called on 
Bush to grant Beets a 30-day reprieve, with senior researcher Allyson 
Collins citing "a perfect opportunity for Governor Bush to display his 
much-touted conservative compassion."

Bush, who is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, had said he 
would not decide what action to take until the matter had run its course in 
the courts.

"The question I'm going to ask is, 'Is she guilty of the crime?'" said the 
governor, who returned to Austin late Wednesday.
Texas has carried out 120 executions since Bush took office in January 1995 
-- the latest on Wednesday night when Cornelius Goss, 38, was put to death 
for a 1987 murder.

Bush has never granted a 30-day reprieve, but he commuted one death penalty 
to life in prison, citing flimsy evidence against the inmate.

The bodies of Beets' fourth and fifth husbands were found under a wishing 
well in the yard of her mobile home at Gun Barrel City, Texas. They had 
been shot in the head, execution-style.

Prosecutors say she murdered Jimmy Don Beets, a Dallas fire captain, but 
she says she doesn't know how her husband was killed.

"I wouldn't willingly do that," Betty Lou Beets said in a death row 
interview. "But I don't remember what happened then ... it's just a blank 
to me."

Correspondent Charles Zewe, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to 
this report.