From midnight to 12:16 a.m., two prison guards hunted for the right places to insert the needles -- and that's where the only complication cropped up. The right arm catheter was attached in five minutes, about normal, but as the guards prodded his left arm for the vein they thought would yield easily, they had no luck.

It took 11 minutes to tap a secondary spot, about twice as long as in most other executions, but Beardslee never moved or spoke as the metal poked at his skin again and again. Neither did the guards, though their lips progressively tightened as they undoubtedly realized the procedure was taking too long.

At least one family member of the victim was glad to see Beardslee die. "I saw what I wanted to see. I'm glad," he said. Not all family members of murdered victims share that view. Check out Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.

There are also differing views of Beardslee's crimes. The Chronicle reports:

Beardslee was in the death chamber because he had throttled and slashed 19-year-old Stacey Benjamin and shotgunned her friend, 23-year-old Patty Geddling, in 1981 after they were lured to his Redwood City apartment in a beef over a drug debt.

According to Jeanne D'Arc of Body and Soul,

Four men murder two young women, but only one of them is sentenced to death. The one who planned the murders? Of course not. It's the one with virtually no function on the right side of his brain. The one who confessed and led investigators to one of the bodies. The one with the passive personality who surely was taking orders from others.

Schwarzenegger's next clemency decision might involve Crips founder Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, nominated for a Nobel peace prize while on death row. He's also the subject of the tv movie Redemption, starring Jamie Fox. We'll have a lot more to say about his clemency petition as that decision gets closer.