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| Inmate's execution set for Wednesday at San Quentin |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 01/18/2005 |
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Donald Beardslee will be executed early Wednesday barring decisions in his favor from last-minute appeals or Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger granting clemency. Beardslee is scheduled to be the 11th condemned inmate executed since California voters reinstated capital punishment in 1978. At one minute after midnight Wednesday, San Quentin State Prison authorities are scheduled to inject a sedative, then a paralyzing agent and finally a dose of poison to stop his heart -- a process that takes about eight minutes. Beardslee's remaining legal challenges before the U.S. Supreme Court include claims that the lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment, and that jurors were unfairly influenced when they rendered a death verdict for the 1981 murders of two women. In his clemency petition, Beardslee's lawyers claim he suffers from brain maladies that prevented him from thinking clearly when he killed Stacey Benjamin, 19, and Patty Geddling, 23, in 1981, after the pair were lured to his Redwood City apartment to avenge a soured $185 drug deal. Prosecutors have said that Beardslee, a Redwood City machinist on parole for murdering a Missouri woman, was not an unwitting dupe when he committed the murders, as his lawyers say. Schwarzenegger has not answered Beardslee's clemency petition, which is a plea for mercy to commute the death sentence to life without parole. Decisions from the Supreme Court and Schwarzenegger could come any time. |
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