Appeals Court to Rule on Execution

A convicted killer scheduled for execution next month may have been improperly sentenced to death because of a jury instruction to consider a special circumstance that was later invalidated, an attorney told a federal appeals court in Pasadena on Tuesday.

Confessed killer Donald Beardslee, who shot one woman and stabbed and strangled another in San Mateo County in 1981, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Jan. 19.

Beardslee, 61, has already spent two decades in appeals that reached and were rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed last week to hear his latest appeal.

Beardslee was originally convicted of killing the women to get even for a soured drug deal. The slayings were deemed “witness killings” because they prevented the victims from testifying against him. The California Supreme Court set aside the witness killing special circumstance in 1991 but affirmed the death sentence.

Beardslee’s attorney, Michael Laurence, argued that the sentencing jury was unduly swayed toward the death penalty by directions to consider the special circumstance and might otherwise have opted for life in prison without parole.

“By placing special circumstances on the side of death, you are loading the case against someone seeking mercy,” Laurence said.

The 9th Circuit has overturned more death sentences than it has upheld. If the three-judge panel denies his appeal, Beardslee could become the 11th condemned inmate to be executed since California reinstated capital punishment in 1978. An additional 640 inmates are on the state’s death row.

The court has not said when it will rule on the case, but Laurence said he believed it would act quickly, given the impending execution date.

Senior Assistant Atty. Gen. Dane Gillette argued against setting aside the death penalty in the Beardslee case, saying the jury gave him such a sentence for only one of the murders and thus was not swayed by the directions concerning the “witness killings.”

Gillette also contended, and the judges agreed, that prosecutors could have argued that Beardslee killed the women to keep them from testifying even if it wasn’t technically a witness killing.

“Even without the special circumstances,” Gillette said, “the prosecution could have argued the exact same thing, that the defendant didn’t want to get caught.”

The killings began when Frank Rutherford, who is serving a life sentence in connection with the murders, shot Paula Geddling in the shoulder at Beardslee’s apartment in Redwood City, where the defendants had lured her and Stacey Benjamin to seek revenge for being stiffed out of drugs.

Beardslee and Rutherford then took Geddling to a roadside along Highway 1, where she was shot several times. The same day, Benjamin was strangled and her throat slit.

The jury convicted Beardslee of the killings. The special circumstance that the crimes were witness killings, as well as the fact that he was convicted of multiple murders, made him eligible for the death penalty.