By JUAN A. LOZANO, Associated Press
HOUSTON (AP) — A Texas inmate whose lawyers say has a history of mental illness faces execution on Wednesday for killing his mother and burying her body in her backyard nearly 20 years ago.
Tracy Beatty, 61, is scheduled to receive a lethal injection Wednesday evening on the state penitentiary in Huntsville. He was sentenced to death for strangling his mother, Carolyn Click, after they argued in November 2003 in her East Texas home.
Authorities say Beatty buried his 62-year-old mother’s body beside her mobile home in Whitehouse, about 115 miles (180 km) southeast of Dallas, after which spent her money on drugs and alcohol.
Beatty’s attorneys have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to remain his scheduled execution, arguing he was being prevented from receiving a full examination to find out if he’s intellectually disabled and possibly ineligible to be put to death. He has had three prior execution dates.
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His attorneys have requested that state prison officials allow Beatty to be uncuffed during mental health evaluations by experts. The experts argue that having Beatty uncuffed during neurological and other tests is crucial to creating an informed decision about mental disability and evaluating his mental health.
One expert who examined Beatty said he “is clearly psychotic and has a posh paranoid delusional belief system” and that he lives in a “complex delusional world” where he believes there’s a “vast conspiracy of correctional officers who … ‘torture’ him via a tool in his ear so he can hear their menacing voices,” Beatty’s lawyers wrote of their Supreme Court petition.
In 2021, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice put in place an off-the-cuff policy, citing security and liability concerns, that will only allow an inmate to be unshackled during an authority evaluation through a court order.
Federal judges in East Texas and Houston and the fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Latest Orleans previously ruled against Beatty’s request for an evaluation without handcuffs. The federal appeals court called Beatty’s request a “delay tactic.” U.S. District Judge Charles Eskridge in Houston last week questioned why Beatty’s lawyers had not raised any claim regarding his mental health during years of appeals and said requiring handcuffs during such an evaluation is “quite simply, a rational security concern.”
While the Supreme Court has prohibited the death penalty for people who’re intellectually disabled, it has not barred such punishment for those with serious mental illness, based on the Death Penalty Information Center.
The Texas Legislature considered a bill in 2019 that will have prohibited the death penalty for somebody with severe mental illness. The laws didn’t pass.
On Monday, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles unanimously declined to commute Beatty’s death sentence to a lesser penalty or to grant a six-month reprieve.
Beatty had a “volatile and combative relationship” together with his mother, based on prosecutors. One neighbor, Lieanna Wilkerson, testified Click told her that Beatty had assaulted her several times before, including once when he had “beaten her so severely that he had left her for dead.” But Wilkerson said Click had still been excited to have Beatty move back in together with her in October 2003 in order that they could mend their relationship.
But mother and son argued each day and Click asked her son twice to maneuver out, including just before she was killed, based on testimony from Beatty’s 2004 trial.
“Several times (Beatty) had said he just desired to shut her up, that he just desired to choke her and shut her up,” Wilkerson testified.
If Beatty is executed, he can be the fourth inmate put to death this yr in Texas and the thirteenth within the U.S. One other execution in Texas — the last one within the state in 2022 — is scheduled for next week.
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