A deadly serious opinion

There is no question over mitigating good deeds. Before the Redwood City killings of Stacey Benjamin and Patty Geddling, Beardslee murdered a third woman in Missouri. While in prison he has not been nominated for the Nobel Prize like fellow condemned inmate Stanley "Tookie" Williams. He has not publicly apologized nor repented. He has not come anywhere close to sainthood.

There is little concern over the method of death. Unlike other states, California employs a poison cocktail known as lethal injection to execute the condemned. Like many before him, Beardslee and his defense team will argue before a U.S. District Judge today in San Jose that the method is inhumane under the Constitution. The argument is unlikely to hold water; the same judge dismissed similar pleas in previous cases and lethal injection is widely acknowledged to be less cruel than the electric chair, gas chamber, firing quad or gallows. Dying in California is like watching a sick animal be gently euthanized, at least in comparison to the rather shocking details of nearly every other mode.

There is no doubt the two women suffered before they died. Geddling, 23, was shot once in the shoulder after being lured to the Redwood City apartment on April 25, 1981. Then she was taken to Half Moon Bay and finished off with two extra shotgun blasts. Benjamin didn't go quietly. It took strangulation with a wire, stabbing and a slit throat to kill the 19-year-old woman after Beardslee and two other men took her to Lake County. Court transcripts quote Beardslee as saying, "The b- wouldn't die."

No one can argue the world is safer with Beardslee dead. He's been on Death Row since the early '80s and would likely remain. Even a new trial, with his admissions of guilty, would be hard-pressed to release him on a much lesser charge.

There is very little for any person to oppose the death of Beardslee, 61, aside from an unwavering belief sanctioned killing by the government is wrong under all circumstances. There is little reason to support the execution aside from the conviction murderers deserve a taste of their own medicine. The ongoing circus of appeals makes the deaths, in all practicality, more a method of vengeance than deterrence.

And so, for the first execution in a very long time, those on both sides of the controversial issue are being asked to take a stand based on very little other than the morality and therefore legality of the act itself. There are no loopholes created by protestations of innocence. There are not the "what ifs" of the state's last death sentence, Scott Peterson, or the last condemned inmate whose execution was stayed, Kevin Cooper. There is very little gray, leaving the scary and uncomfortable proposition of picking a side based simply on the issue instead of the human being at stake.

In a nation and a state that sanctions capital punishment, it is imperative for residents and voters to individually weigh in - without the easy caveats about possible exoneration - on whether it is a necessary or correct answer to society's ills.

Beardslee may still escape death. There is today's hearing, a plea for leniency before Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and every possibility for another judicial stay in between. Regardless of whether he goes forward to execution or stays in prison indefinitely, though, the issue of capital punishment remains. From Hammurabi's edict of "an eye for an eye" to the Biblical commandment "thou shall not kill," the concept of execution is not easily answered nor easily ignored.

Even after his scheduled Jan. 19 execution, the question remains: is it right? Be brave enough to decide.