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19 Legal Stud. F. 411 (1995)
Mercy and Justice in a Capital Murder Trial

handle is hein.journals/lstf19 and id is 421 raw text is: Mercy and Justice in a Capital Murder Trial Ashley R. Packard and Cynthia M. Davenport Convicted murderer Eric Beishline sat stone-faced in a Columbia, Missouri courtroom waiting for a jury to decide whether he would live or die. He knew their decision would depend on whose testimony they found more compelling - the shaky voice of his victim's daughter describing the torture of knowing how her mother spent the last moments of her life, or the desperate plea that his own mother made as she begged them not to kill her son. Eric Beishline, a handsome young insurance agent who preyed on the elderly to finance his drug addiction, grew up in a close-knit, upper middle-class Catholic family in Hobart, Indiana. As a child, he showed great promise. In fact, his mother testified that at the age of 13, he saved the lives of two fellow campers who nearly drowned in a canoeing accident at an Indiana state park. The local paper published a story about his heroism. Joyce Beishline held the laminated article in her hand as she spoke on the stand. We were so proud of him, she said. It was just ... he was young, but we weren't surprised that he would do something like that. Eric was never a bad child. In fact, his life was punctuated by moments of great promise. But he was always a handful. In kindergarten, when all the other kids brought the teacher an apple, Eric brought her a paper sack that contained a snake. It scared her, his father said, but she smiled because she knew that Eric lived out in the woods and that was what he was into. When he was seven, Eric's pediatrician diagnosed him as hyperactive and prescribed the drug Ritalin, which he took for almost three years. We weren't real comfortable with giving him medication, his mother said. But it was something the pediatrician recommended, and, of course, you go along with those things. Eventually the Ritalin seemed to lengthen Eric's attention span and reduce his hyperactivity, so his parents laid their worries aside. The Beishlines later learned from an expert witness who testified at their son's trial that Ritalin's effect on the central nervous system is similar to that of cocaine, Eric's drug of choice. But he did not start with cocaine. When Eric was 12, his school principal caught him smoking marijuana and suspended him from school. Of course you think that something is ter- ribly wrong and he should know better, Joyce Beishline told the jury. We started to look within ourselves and our family - that maybe we were doing something wrong or there was a problem. You look for answers. Legal Studies Forum, Volume XIX, Number 4 (1995)

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