Convicted murderer Barry Beach is today a free man. Governor Steve Bullock issued an executive order granting Beach’s clemency request at noon, and a short time later Beach met with reporters outside the state prison in Deer Lodge, thanking the governor, the legislature, the media, and everyone else who made his release possible.
Freelance journalist John S. Adams was recording as Beach made his emotional statement.
“You can't keep fighting unless you believe. You have to believe that you have to hope you have to pray and know that those prayers are being heard, that someday if you could just hang on it come to this. I'm thankful."
It’s not the first time Beach has walked out of the state prison. Four years ago he was released when a Billings judge granted his request for a new trial. Eighteen months later, the state Supreme Court Reversed that ruling and sent Beach back to prison to continue serving a 100-year sentence without parole for the 1979 killing of high school classmate Kimberly Nees. This time, though, Beach knows he won’t be going back.
“I've yet to actually read the governor's order, so I don't know what the terminology is, but it's my understanding it is some type of a time served, so no, the chances of coming back this time which was probably my worst experience in life to be honest with you was having to come turn myself in and come back to this place. It took me a couple years to overcome that moment. This time there’s going to be a lot of healing and a lot of tears between here and Billings Montana.”
Beach was convicted in 1984, based largely on a confession he later said was coerced. Over the years as Beach worked for his freedom, his case gained notoriety, through a report on NBC’s Dateline as well as efforts by a Christian group that Beach reached out to.
Despite those efforts, and the many questions surrounding his trial, including witnesses who contradicted the prosecution’s version of events, the Montana pardon and parole board refused to grant Beach’s clemency request, on the grounds that Beach was not rehabilitated.
Rehabilitation, the board said, requires not just being a good citizen in prison, but also admitting guilt ... and Beach has said all along that he’s innocent. Under the law, if the pardon and parole board denies a clemency request, that’s the end of the story ... or it was, until this year, when Margie Macdonald got involved. Macdonald is a state representative form Billings.
“In the spring of 2014 when the parole board basically blocked Beach’s application for clemency and refused to forward that to the governor, even though he has written to them and requested that he be given the opportunity to weigh in on it, I felt that signaled to me that that there was something broken in our system.”
Macdonald sponsored house Bill 43 in the 2015 legislature, which allowed the Governor to approve a clemency request even after the Parole Board turns it down. At the January hearing where the bill was introduced, there was only one witness against it ... the former chairman of the parole board, Mike McKee, who called Beach an unrepentant murder, and pleaded with lawmakers not to inject politics into the process.
"You're saying the governor can cherry pick which cases he wants to hear which political contributors have given him money for his campaign which friends are of the governor or his associates we want to listen to and then do what he wants to do,” McKee argued.
To say that lawmakers saw it differently is an understatement. Macdonald’s bill passed 88 to 12 in the state House and 50 to zero in the state Senate. In was one of several bills designed to reduce the power of the pardon and parole board.
In October, Beach again filed a request for clemency. The Parole board passed it on to the governor, as it is now required to do, and Bullock freed Barry Beach.
“You know we got a long trip ahead of us but we’re stopping somewhere at a KFC and eating some chicken... It’s very ironic that for the past six months we’ve been planning an event in Billings and it's extremely ironic in God's timing that today I'm going to be at that event that we've been planning for 6 months in Billings Montana, and ironically it’s at the Clock Tower Inn where I work so, well, a lot of things that God's hand is revealing himself in today,” Beach said.
Today Barry Beach returned to the home in Billings where he lived during his 18 months outside prison, and began living the rest of his life as a free man.
