Miscarriage of Justice, Texas-Style

On Thursday, the state of Texas is scheduled to execute a 62-year-old great-grandmother with a horrifying history of beatings and sexual abuse.

Betty Lou Beets would become the second woman executed in Texas since Gov. George W. Bush took office in 1995. To date, Bush has presided over an astonishing 119 executions that, with a few notable exceptions, have been greeted with remarkable indifference by Texans and the public at large. The Beets case may prove to be another exception.

Beets’ death sentence raises a number of nettlesome questions for the governor, not the least of which is whether the condemned woman’s own attorney sold her out for his own personal profit. Another is what the people of Texas would actually gain by putting this woman to death. A third is what Bush, the aspiring president, could lose.

Bush is clearly no soft touch when it comes to clemency. In February 1998, he refused to intercede in the execution of Karla Faye Tucker, the pick-ax murderer and born-again Christian whose cause was championed by many of Bush’s close friends on the religious right. So far, Bush has commuted only one death sentence, that of Henry Lee Lucas, a convicted serial murderer who the state sought to execute for a crime he almost certainly did not commit.

At first blush, Beets would seem an unlikely candidate to move the governor. She was convicted in 1985 of murdering her fifth husband, Jimmy Don Beets, a former Dallas fireman, by shooting him in the head. Jimmy Don Beets was buried under a little wishing well at the front of his mobile home just outside Gun Barrel, Texas. Mrs. Beets was also charged in the death of her fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker, but that case never came to trial. Barker was found buried under a shed at the back of Beets’ home with a bullet in his brain.

Gov. Bush has said he applies two “standards” to clemency appeals. One is evidence of innocence, such as that which came to light in Lucas’ case; another is whether a condemned prisoner has had full access to the courts.

Although Betty Lou Beets claims she is innocent, her appeal for clemency goes to Bush’s second standard. Beets says she was denied a fair trial because her attorney deliberately withheld exculpatory and mitigating evidence. Under Texas law, she could not be sentenced to death unless the state proved that she murdered her husband so she could recover a $100,000 pension and insurance policy.

But Mrs. Beets says her attorney, E. Ray Andrews, deliberately failed to tell the jury that she did not know about the insurance policy until more than a year after her husband’s murder, when Andrews himself told her about it. Andrews, who has since served a three-year federal prison sentence for extorting a bribe in another murder case, allegedly withheld the evidence because he had obtained the literary and movie rights to Beets’ story in exchange for representing her. Had Andrews disclosed what he knew about the insurance policy, he would have had to testify on Beets’ behalf, which would have meant withdrawing as her counsel and losing what he viewed as the lucrative movie rights. Because Andrews kept silent, the state’s alleged motive was never seriously contested, and Beets was sentenced to die.

Andrews also failed to apprise the jury of Beets’ long history of sexual abuse. Beets’ current attorneys claim she was raped when she was 5 years old, beaten repeatedly by her alcoholic father, and sexually and physically assaulted and psychologically abused by a series of five husbands. They argue that knowledge of this mitigating evidence might have swayed a jury to conclude that Beets did not deserve to die for her crime.

In reviewing death sentences, Bush and his aides say he takes account of a condemned individual’s personal history--including such factors as sexual abuse and family violence--as well as whether there was a fair trial. In practice, however, the governor has yet to grant a single clemency appeal for any of those reasons. Indeed, he has turned down three clemency appeals in non-death cases by women who claimed they were battered by their husbands, and he has allowed executions to proceed that involved serious questions of due process. Governors in at least four other states have commuted sentences of battered women in recent years.

A coalition of domestic violence and women’s rights groups has appealed to Bush to grant a reprieve so that the evidence withheld from Beets’ jury can be examined. Safe Place, a domestic violence center in Austin--on whose board the governor’s wife, Laura, served until last year--sent Bush a letter that called Beets’ legal representation “inadequate and egregiously compromised.” The group claimed that Beets’ “long history of severe sexual and domestic violence . . . left her with substantive psychological and physical impairments.”

Under Texas law, Bush cannot grant clemency without the recommendation of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. But Bush has appointed all 18 members of the board, and there is little doubt that if he made it known he was concerned about Beets’ apparent denial of due process, the board would almost certainly grant a reprieve or commute her sentence to life in prison.

Bush should examine the evidence that Beets was denied a fair trial and get his friends on the board to grant a reprieve so that the process by which this woman was condemned to die can be examined. That could conceivably take this potential tar baby off of the governor’s hands until after the election. It might also convince some voters concerned about domestic violence that Bush is actually the “compassionate conservative” he claims to be, and not just a rubber stamp for an endless series of executions.