Tracy Beatty executed: Texas death row inmate given lethal injection as his legal team exhausted final stay attempt after citing mental illness as Supreme Court refused to intervene.
A Texas man having exhausted all his efforts from being executed by the state after being convicted in the ‘capital’ murder of his mother in 2003 was Wednesday night put to rest by lethal injection.
Tracy Beatty, 61, had previously been convicted of strangling his mother and burying her body in her own yard nearly 20 years ago.
The inmate who was now just one year older than what his mother was at her death, was found guilty of murdering his mother, Carolyn Click, after an argument in her East Texas mobile home in November 2003.
Beatty’s lawyers had appealed his death sentence, arguing he shouldn’t be executed due to his history of mental illness. However, the Supreme Court shot down the appeal Wednesday morning to stop the execution the Texas Tribune reported.
Beatty who was put on death row in 2004, was previously scheduled to be executed in 2009, 2015, and 2020. All were stayed.
‘See you on the other side.’
The condemned man, in the presence of his wife, uttered ‘See you on the other side’ before he received a lethal injection of pentobarbital at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
Beatty choked up and began sobbing when the warden asked if he had any final words before his life was ended.
Strapped to a gurney, he could barely get the words out as his voice broke.
‘I just want to thank …,’ Beatty spoke directly to his wife watching from the viewing room behind glass. ‘I don’t want you leave you, baby. See you when you get there. I love you.’
He blew a kiss to her and then offered his gratitude to fellow death row inmates, naming several.
‘I love you, brothers,’ he said. ‘See you on the other side.’
Prosecutors said Beatty strangled his 62-year-old mom and then buried her body beside her mobile home in Whitehouse before blowing her money on drugs and alcohol.
Premeditated murder?
The mother and son had a ‘volatile and combative relationship,’ prosecutors said. Click confided in a neighbor that Beatty had assaulted her several times before her murder. She said he once had ‘beaten her so severely that he had left her for dead,’ the neighbor, Lieanna Wilkerson, testified.
Beatty moved back in with Click a month before her death and she had been excited for his return so that they could have time to mend their relationship, Wilkerson said.
However, the pair began arguing daily and Click asked him to move out at least twice, including just before she was killed, according to trial testimony.
Although Beatty gave several versions of what happened in his 62-year-old mother’s death, according to court records, he ultimately told police that he came home drunk, the pair started fighting and he choked her. He said he didn’t realize Click was dead until the next day.
Beatty was found guilty of capital murder because prosecutors argued he killed his mother during a home burglary, entering without her consent, even though he lived with Click at the time. Wilkerson testified that Click had told her the day she was last seen that she had told her son that day to move out after a fight.
‘Several times [Beatty] had said he just wanted to shut her up, that he just wanted to choke her and shut her up,’ Wilkerson testified.
#THISISNOTJUSTICE#THISISVENGEANCE #TracyBeatty will be executed tonight. Tracy has been on Texas death row since 2004. At his first trial, forensic psychiatrists claimed he was not mentally ill and had a normal intelligence quotient. pic.twitter.com/UZG61TuqD9
— 💥 MadeInNovemberX 💥 (@MadeInNovemberX) November 9, 2022
What constitutes cruel and unusual punishment?
Beatty had been released from prison on parole months before Click’s death. Prosecutors at trial listed a slew of his previous criminal charges, including injuring a prison guard and assaulting an 18-month-old child, with the man having an extensive criminal record from the 80’s.
In their petition to the courts to spare his life, Beatty’s legal team cited one expert’s opinion that the murder was ‘clearly psychotic and has a complex paranoid delusional belief system’ in which he thinks correctional officers torture him with their ‘menacing voices’ via a device in his ear.
The Supreme Court has not barred those with serious mental illness from the death penalty before, though it has prohibited the fatal sentence to the intellectually disabled.
On June 20, 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia that executing people with intellectual disabilities violated the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, overruling its Penry v. Lynaugh decision in 1989.
Of note, executions of the mentally disabled are prohibited under the 8th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Along with the Supreme Court, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott declined to intervene in Beatty’s planned execution.
Beatty was pronounced dead at 6:39 p.m. CT, becoming the fourth inmate to be executed in Texas this year and the 13th nationwide. Seven more executions are scheduled in Texas through September, 2023.
