Donald Beardslee executed - Killer put to death at San Quentin

San Francisco Chronicle ^ | 1/19/5 | Bob Egelko

[SmithL]

Condemned murderer Donald Beardslee, who killed two young Peninsula women in 1981 while on parole from an earlier murder conviction, was executed by lethal injection early today at San Quentin State Prison.

Beardslee spent the last hours before his execution talking with his spiritual adviser and members of his legal team. He skipped the traditional last meal and only drank grapefruit juice before his death.

No members of Beardslee's family were present for the execution, and the sole person who attended on his behalf was his attorney, Jeannie Sternberg.

Beardslee, of Redwood City, was convicted of the shotgun killing of Patty Geddling, 23, and the throat-slashing murder of Stacey Benjamin, 19. Prosecutors said the women were killed in revenge for a $185 drug debt claimed by another man.

[SmithL]

The world is a safer and better place now.

[Redcloak]

A proper hanging would have been better, but this will do.

[SmithL]

Around 6 p.m., prison officials escorted him to the death-watch cell in the prison, where he passed the evening with his spiritual adviser Margaret Harrell.

Margaret Harrell gets around. This is from 2001:

Should killers have spiritual advisers up to execution time?

The Associated Press, Jan. 2, 2001
http://www.uniontrib.com/

SAN QUENTIN -- In his last hours on Earth, California death-row inmate Thomas Thompson fought to stay alive and, failing that, yearned to be with his spiritual adviser until the last moments.

He lost the first battle and won a compromise on the second, staying in a cell adjacent to the Rev. Margaret Harrell until about 20 minutes to midnight. Later, he was able to gaze at her face through the glass windows of San Quentin State Prison's death chamber.

The state maintains that such visits with spiritual advisers pose too much of a safety risk. It's an argument some inmate advocates find hard to believe.

''What are they going to do, hit someone with a Bible or the Koran or something?'' said Robert Bryan, a defense attorney who isn't involved in the Harrell case but represents several death-row inmates.

On Thursday, the issue goes before the California Supreme Court, where Harrell's attorneys will argue that spiritual advisers should be removed at the last feasible moment before executions, which in California can take place any time after midnight.

San Quentin prison spokesman Lt. Vernell Crittendon says allowing someone like Harrell to stay after 6 p.m. means that an outsider is present as the execution team begins preparations. ''Those folks turn around and they now know the identity of the individuals carrying out the ultimate punishment on behalf of the citizens of California, and that may cause some concern,'' Crittendon said.

The state-employed prison chaplain may remain with the inmate longer, if so requested. However, even the official chaplain must leave well before the prisoner is led into the death chamber. (...)

Death-row inmates take into prison their First Amendment right to freedom of religion, but there's no national standard for access to spiritual advisers, said Robert Lynn, immediate past president of the American Correctional Chaplains Association, the religious arm of the American Correctional Association.

''We in the ACCA would like to see a uniform policy nationwide regarding executions with hopefully as much humane treatment as possible toward the condemned,'' he said.

[Tall_Texan]

Suzanne McLennan, middle, holds a sign opposing the death penalty outside of San Quentin State Prison in San Quentin, Calif., Tuesday night, Jan. 18, 2005. Convicted killer Donald Beardslee, an inmate at San Quentin, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at San Quentin early Wednesday morning. Beardslee's plea for clemency and his appeals before the U.S. Supreme Court were rejected Tuesday, clearing the final hurdles to the state's 11th execution since it reinstated the death penalty. (AP Photo/Marcio Jose Sanchez)

You bet it ain't Texas, honey! We don't let our cockroaches wait around on Death Row at taxpayer expense until they're almost dead. We believe some folks just needed killin'. We don't leave that sort of trash waitin' to be taken out any longer than we have to. Deal with it, honey.

Oh, and, uh, nice goin' Gov. Terminator....

[Lawdoc]

I have to say that it seems a very small thing to allow a man who is imminently on the way to meet his Maker, to have access to his preacher (I detest the PC phrase "spiritual advisor") regardless of the heinous crime(s) he/she/it commits.

As for the safety of the "spiritual advisor" - assumption of the risk as far as I am concerned.

[BulletBobCo]

California death row.....1 down.....600+ to go.

[loboinok]

I have to say that it seems a very small thing to allow a man who is imminently on the way to meet his Maker, to have access to his preacher


He had 24 years to make his peace with God. If he hadn't done it by now, 30 more minutes won't matter one way or another.
Besides, he was on death row longer than his victims were alive.

[Lion Den Dan]

I have to say that it seems a very small thing ..., to have access to his preacher

I wonder if the victim had access to their preacher? Actually, I believe that a murderer should be eliminated in the same manner in which the murder was committed, i.e. murder by beating or throat slashing, execution by the same means.

[Blue_Ridge_Mtn_Geek]

''What are they going to do, hit someone with a Bible or the Koran or something?'' said Robert Bryan, a defense attorney who isn't involved in the Harrell case but represents several death-row inmates.

---

In fact, due to assaults committed with hard cover Gideon-placed Bibles (e.g., bashing a fellow inmate's windpipe in with the spine of the book) we cannot place such Bibles any longer in Central Prison in Raleigh, NC. All must have the hard covers stripped off, or be soft cover to begin with.

So, defense attorney Bryan has an answer to his silly question: your clients belong to a group that seems to have a much better imagination than you do when it comes to turning things into weapons. Who would have thought? LOL

[Route101]

Good idea...the grapefruit juice would have put more acid in the body causing a better "electrical connection"....

[cweese]

a better "electrical connection"....

Why would that make a difference for lethal injection???

[driftless]

I'd like the mostly-liberal anti-death penalty advocates to think about this particular execution. This piece of garbage was out on parole, for murder, when he committed two more murders.
All the bleeding-hearts should think about all the innocent people murdered over the years by scum let out on parole because they had been ahem "rehabilitated". So the next time you anti-dpers mourn the possibility of an innocent man or woman being executed, think about all the people dead because we let all the "rehabilitated" killers out on parole and we didn't execute the guilty.

[Route101]

Excuse my excitement...I thought he was fried.......

[PilloryHillary]

A convicted killer actually EXECUTED in CALIFORNIA???? Good news! Thank you Gov. Terminator! Keep 'em coming!

[IronJack]

It's nice to wake up to a better world. For Beardslee, I suspect the awakening is somewhat more subdued.

[cweese]

It would have definitely been a more fitting end to his existence if he had been fried, especially if he caught fire after his eyeballs blew. Oh well, justice was served.

[Route101]

Copy...justice served...by the people for the the people...

[csvset]

Relatives wait decades for killer's execution

By KEVIN FAGAN
January 16, 2005

To this day, the family can be sharing dinner, chuckling over old times, when suddenly someone mentions the name that stops them all cold.

Stacey.

"That's when it gets real quiet, and we all just kind of shut down," T. Tom Amundsen said, voice barely masking fury. "We just start thinking about her, and we wonder, 'Who can we call to talk to about this?' But we know there's nobody. It's all so horrible. There's nothing we can do."

This week there will be.

Barring a last-minute stay or clemency order from the governor, Amundsen will be able to watch the execution of the man who strangled his 19-year-old sister, Stacey Benjamin, with a wire 24 years ago before finishing her off by slicing her throat.

The killer, Donald Beardslee, left Benjamin's half-dressed body sprawled in the weeds off a lonely road after midnight near Lakeport in Northern California. Earlier that night, 110 miles south, he had taken a shotgun to her friend, 23-year-old Patty Geddling, and killed her.

Defense attorneys argue that Beardslee, now 61, was too brain-damaged to know what he was doing, so a more appropriate sentence than death would be life without parole. Nobody in Benjamin's family agrees with that. Neither does anybody in Geddling's family.

They have impatiently waited 24 years for the stroke of 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, when executioners at San Quentin State Prison are scheduled to inject enough poison into Beardslee's veins to kill him. It should take about five minutes for Beardslee to die.

"This Beardslee, he's been in prison longer than my sister was alive," Amundsen, 54, said by phone from his home near Seattle. "She never got a chance to have a baby, be a wife or a grandmother. She'll never experience having a wedding. All that time since she died ... all that time, wasted. He can't die soon enough for me."

Renee Geddling, who was 4 when Beardslee shot her mother in the head, doesn't think an execution will bring her peace. But it's a step she is anxious to see carried out.

"Obviously, there will never be closure for me, as far as me not having a mother - as far as me having to grow up without a mother," Geddling, now 28, said quietly. "But as far as justice being served, it would be good to at least have that."

Court and police records say Benjamin and Patty Geddling were killed over a drug debt - an acquaintance of Beardslee's had given them $185 to buy methamphetamine for him, and he was angry that they never gave him either the drugs or the money back. Testimony given during the trials of Beardslee and his cohorts - two of whom were also convicted of murder - referred to Benjamin and Geddling almost exclusively as a pair of young women who wanted to buy dope, wound up buying it from the wrong guys, and perhaps hung out with a fast crowd.

Their families say that thumbnail description is not just misleading, it also does the murdered women an injustice.

"These were very sweet girls," said Doris "Trudie" Anderson, Benjamin's godmother. "I had them both to dinner, and they stayed overnight, and you couldn't have found nicer, more polite young women. And Stacey - well, she was just so full of life from the minute she was born, so loving and with so much promise.

"Those people that killed them were just dirty low-lifes who had nothing to do with them before they killed them."

Source

[em2vn]

Who is going to administer such an execution, you?

[goldstategop]

Amen! Its too bad he wasn't executed a decade ago. Justice delayed is justice denied. At least one killer no longer walks on the face of the earth.