Tiede reaches out for a handshake with long time friend Eric Couch after Tiede's hearing in the 123rd District Court at the Panola County Courthouse, in Carthage, Texas, on Tuesday May 6, 2014. Tiede, a former mortician, whose killing of a rich widow shook an East Texas town and later inspired a movie was released on bond Tuesday after the district attorney who prosecuted him agreed to let him out of a life sentence. (AP Photo/The News-Journal, Michael Cavazos)
I can’t count the number of times I’ve read stories about death sentences for convicted criminals whose mental capacity was that of a third or fourth grader. Then there are stories of women being put to death for killing their abusive husbands. If we looked into the histories of most sex offenders, including those who killed their victims, I think we’d come up with volumes of evidence of how they themselves were sexually abused as children.
Yet those circumstances rarely afford such convicted killers the kind of special treatment that Bernie Tiede is receiving in Panola County. Tiede, a former mortician in Carthage, killed his 81-year-old companion, Marjorie Nugent and stuffed her body into a freezer. She was missing for month until the body was found in 1996. A jury heard the evidence and convicted Tiede. He received a life sentence.
The world would probably have moved on and allowed Tiede to rot in prison for what he did, were it not for filmmaker Richard Linklater, whose 2011 film “Bernie” offered a somewhat sympathetic portrayal of Tiede and the circumstances leading to Nugent’s death. It was an excellent, entertaining, funny and baffling film.
But the fact that Tiede’s story inspired Linklater doesn’t mean Tiede should be excused or receive special treatment for what he did. A Panola County judge heard testimony that Tiede was sexually abused as a child, and that this played into his behavior when he killed the domineering, verbally abusive Nugent. The judge ordered Tiede released from prison and placed him in Linklater’s custody.
Why is he getting such special treatment? Think of all the years that Michael Morton spent in prison fighting for his real, honest-to-goodness innocence without receiving a whit of special treatment. Or Betty Lou Beets, executed in 2000 for murdering her husband after claiming in court that she had been sexually abused as a child and abused by the husband she killed as well as her previous husbands.
There are extenuating circumstances in pretty much every murder case. A history of childhood sexual abuse does not constitute a get-out-of-jail-free card for any acts of violence that follow. Bernie Tiede was portrayed in the film as a really nice guy, and by most accounts of people who knew him in Carthage, he was in real life. But he killed someone.
I’m all for mercy. I’m all for common sense. I want judges to weigh extenuating circumstances when meting out punishment. But there are hundreds of other cases that deserved to be placed ahead of Tiede’s if, all of a sudden, we’re going to go back and retry the facts that preceded serious acts like the one he committed.