Clarence Ernest Beardslee, A/K/A Clarence Everett Beardslee v. United States

BLACKMUN, Circuit Judge.

Clarence E. Beardslee stands convicted by a federal jury of the murders of his mother, Charlotte Marie Schaeffer, and his eleven-year-old halfbrother, Gregory Eugene Schaeffer, at Mission, South Dakota, in June 1965. Both verdicts, rendered July 29, 1966, found him guilty of murder in the first degree, in violation, as charged in the indictment, of 18 U.S.C. § 1153, 1 the so-called Ten Major Crimes Act, and § 1111. 2 The jury, however, as § 1111(b) permits, qualified each verdict by adding to it the words “without capital punishment”. The defendant thus escaped the…