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,