A Humane Death Sentence? - Bettie Lou Beets

Humanist, July, 2000 by Mary Frances Robinson

FOUR CLAYS AFTER the state of Texas executed Bettie Lou Beets this past February, a letter from her arrived my mailbox, The letter had taken its time to reach me.

A sixty-two-year-old great-grandmother, Bettie (her spelling--not used in virtually all mainstream media reports) had been convicted in 1985 of killing her fifth husband and was sentenced to death row. She also had been convicted of shooting and wounding her second husband and had been charged with fatally shooting her fourth.

But for the last two years I had known Bettie as my friend and pen pal. Opening her letter took me back to the grim evening of her lethal injection as I and others waited outside "The Walls" prison in Huntsville wondering what was going on inside. The handwriting was familiar. She was frightened.

We humans are both blessed and cursed with imagination. It is that quality, said ethologist Jane Goodall--not toolmaking or feeling for another person--that separates us from other primates. We can imagine death.

Imagination took me to my friend's cell. In pages of words shaking in illegible scrawls that even re-reading today bring tears to my eyes, I could feel her fear, her scant hope that she would win a reprieve. "I wish Joe [Joseph Margulies, her attorney] was here," Bettie wrote me. "I am sure he will be soon. I need to know what he is doing out there. Maybe he'll call." Only about an hour before her death, the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to get involved in her case. Minutes later, a final attempt at a reprieve had failed when Texas Governor George W. Bush declined to intervene. Bush has intervened only once in the more than 120 executions he has approved since taking office in 1995.

"I hope too I'll be able to see you," her letter continued. "That may be too much to hope for but still I hope.... I know you won't get this until it is all over, whatever way it goes, and I believe it will be a go." The condemned's last moments are not generally recognized as torture. But I could feel her anticipation of humiliation and death as she prepared to be strapped in before witnesses to take her last breath. She is number 208 on the list of executions by Texas since capital punishment was reinstated there in 1982.

Across the driveway from the red brick fortress prison that protects the execution chamber is the administration building and pressroom. There witnesses to Bettie's death took turns stating what they had just experienced and its meaning for them. The Austin American-Statesman published the following account of Margulies' press statement:

What happens is a deep wretching spasm that heaves the person up off the table, and that is what happened to Betty.... A line of spittle flew from her mouth and landed on her chin .... The last breath shoots out of her, and then she lapses into unconsciousness.

Earlier he had said that Bettie was scared. But was it just this sort of death that had frightened her?

She may have heard how the State of Florida had prepared John Spenkelink for his execution. It was Florida's first after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1972 moratorium, which also instructed states to improve their judicial selection of death-eligible candidates. At an Austin conference for death-penalty opponents, I had heard about Spenkelink's death in the electric chair from Randall Dale Adams, the innocent man of The Thin Blue Line documentary who had been freed from prison twelve years after a brief Texas trial put him on death row.

In a monotone that bit the words, Adams conveyed the coroner's report, which said Spenkelink had cotton stuffed up his rectum, in his penis, up his nose, and in his ears and had a ball placed in his mouth to silence him. Surely most listeners to Adams' talk recognized this example as torturous and inhumane. Why was it necessary for the state to degrade Spenkelink so before killing him?

I hope Bettie never heard the story reported by Amnesty International in July 1998: "A condemned man is held strapped with a needle for 70 minutes while his last appeal is being argued in the courts. He loses." Wasn't it enough that the man was going to die? Did the state have to punctuate his mortality by leaving him strapped in with a needle for more than an hour?

The conditions on death row are also so inhumane that some would prefer death. For her final days in the Mountain View Unit in Gatesville, Bettie had been removed from her work program and placed in an isolation cell in the prison's multipurpose facility. It housed the punished, the acting-out mentally ill, and three other condemned women who were not in the work program. The move to isolation also carried with it a new status for Bettie: administrative segregation, a punishment designation.

Officers were supposed to regularly check on Bettie, but that unit is high-maintenance and understaffed. Through the bars of her own cell and two dayroom windows, Pamela Perillo was the only one who had a constant view of Bettie, sitting on her bed, staring at her cell wall. Pamela pushed the guards. "Go on down the hall and talk to Bettie," she told them. "She's all alone and no one talks to her." The guards replied that they didn't know what to say.