Hei,
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Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles
Executive Clemency Section
P.O. Box 13401, Capital Station
Austin,Texas 78711
Phone (512) 406-5852
Fax (512) 467-0945
Gerald Garrett, Chairman
Re: Clemency application of Betty Lou Beets #000810 DOB: 3/12/37
Scheduled for execution: Feb. 24, 2000
Dear Board Members:
We ask you to grant clemency to our friend Betty Lou Beets. She has had
a perfect prison record for 14 years with no disciplinary cases against
her. She presents no danger to her community.
She has worked every day that work was offered with the exception of
times of illness or injury. She gets along exceptionally well with
custody staff and prisoners as you would learn if you inquired. She is
a contributing member to her community.
She is supported in her religious faith by her church, headed by Rev.
Paul Carlin of Crockett, Texas. With the help of others, she has grown
in understanding of the generational cycle of domestic abuse and has
expressed her desire to help other domestic violence victims in the
future. If you spare her life, she will be an asset to any community
whether inside or outside an institution. The people of Texas will not
be safer and justice will not be served by taking the life of Ms. Beets.
Ms. Beets' attorney, John Blume, gives compelling reasons to grant
clemency to our friend:
"Betty Lou Beets is a 62 year-old great-grandmother. Born into a poor
sharecropping family in North Carolina, her mother was mentally ill and
her father an abusive alcoholic. Betty was rendered almost entirely
deaf by a childhood illness, and this disability made it impossible for
her to interact normally with other children or to complete her
education. Physically small and frail, at 15 she married the first of a
succession of abusive men, and she spent most of her adult life caring
for her children and having difficulty obtaining employment because of
her deafness. At age 43, she was in a car accident which left her brain
damaged.
In 1985, Betty was charged with the murder of her 5th husband, Jimmy
Don Beets, an alcoholic who weighed almost twice as much as Betty and
who beat her and her children, and terrorized them with guns. In order
to make her case eligible for the death penalty, the State claimed that
she had murdered her husband in order to claim insurance money, although
in fact she was unaware of the existence of insurance until a year after
his death. No evidence concerning Jimmy Don's violence towards Betty
was presented at her trial, nor did the jury hear any evidence in
mitigation of sentence. There was no expert testimony about Betty's
hearing disability or the extent of her brain damage.
Betty's case became highly publicized, and her trial attorney persuaded
her to sign a contract giving him all the media rights to her story.
This type of media rights contract is considered to be unethical by the
legal profession in the United States. The attorney who represented
Betty at trial was the same person who originally realized that she
might be entitled to claim the insurance money, but he failed to
withdraw from the case in order to testify on her behalf. If he had
withdrawn he would have lost the media rights to her story. This same
lawyer, E. Ray Andrews, was elected as District Attorney after he
represented Betty. While D.A. he was indicted for taking a bribe in
return for agreeing to drop a murder charge, and was convicted and
imprisoned.
Betty has twice been granted a new trial - once in state court, once in
federal court - only to have the decision subsequently vacated on
rehearing."
Ms. Beets has lost her chance to tell her story to jurors who certainly
would have been moved by the telling, especially the many women in Texas
who have experienced violence in the home. No one hearing Ms. Beets
whole story would have wished her to die. We believe, and courts have
said, that the clemency process functions to catch any human errors that
escaped the judicial process. This is one such error. Surely, the
citizens of Texas never intended to give the state permission to execute
an elderly, disabled woman.
Sincerely,
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