The Washington Post
Wednesday, February 23, 2000
Texas Board Won't Spare Condemned Woman
By Paul Duggan
AUSTIN, Feb. 22 -- The Texas pardons board declined to intercede today in the planned execution of a woman who says she was a victim of decades of abuse before she killed her fifth husband in 1983.
Betty Lou Beets, 62, who is scheduled to die Thursday, was a victim of "emotional torment" by the husband she killed, said Joe Margulies, one of her appellate lawyers. He said she also suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuse in four previous marriages and during her childhood.
Her appellate lawyers have argued that evidence of the abuse should have been presented to the jury that voted for the death penalty in her 1985 trial. The lawyers blame her trial attorney, saying he was grossly ineffective and had a conflict of interest that weakened his defense of Beets.
She was convicted of murdering Jimmy Don Beets to collect his life insurance and pension benefits. His body was found buried in the yard of her trailer home in East Texas in 1985, along with the body of her fourth husband, who had been shot in 1981. She was not prosecuted in that slaying.
The state Board of Pardons and Paroles, by a 13 to 5 vote, said it would not recommend that Gov. George W. Bush (R) commute Beets's sentence to life in prison. Bush may grant clemency only with a majority recommendation from the board.
Only once since Bush, a GOP candidate for president, became governor in January 1993 has the board recommended that he spare a condemned inmate, and he did.
Beets's attorneys say jurors might have spared her life had they known she suffered from abuse-related problems. The lawyers also say her trial attorney should have quit and testified for her because he had knowledge that might have cast doubt on the alleged financial motive for the killing--the basis for the death sentence. The trial attorney, an acknowledged alcoholic, would have lost his fee had he withdrawn. His fee, which turned out to be worthless, was the book and movie rights to Beets's story.
