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In matters of life or death, judge has tackled several

By MOLLY MOORHEAD
Published April 16, 2007

DADE CITY - Walter Morris stood before a judge on Feb. 15, 2001, with eight voices calling for his execution.

He had been convicted of the 1997 murder of 2-year-old Dustin Gee in which prosecutors said the 6-foot-1, 260-pound Morris wore steel-toe work boots when he beat and stomped the toddler for throwing a tantrum during a wrestling broadcast.

By an 8-4 vote, jurors said he should die for his crime.

The judge opted to spare Morris' life. Senior Circuit Judge Robert Beach, in sending him to prison for life, called the killing inexcusable, but not planned.

Today, Beach will preside over the first-degree murder trial of Alfredie Steele Jr., accused in the 2003 shooting death of a Pasco sheriff's deputy.

He too faces a possible death sentence.

Beach, who retired from the Pinellas bench in 1992, has handed down the ultimate punishment at least 10 times in his long career. Higher courts overturned two of them.

First appointed in 1968 by Gov. Claude Kirk, Beach was re-elected five times without opposition. He is small in stature but exhibits a brisk, stern style in the courtroom. He was born in Hollywood, Calif., and hitchhiked to Florida at age 20. He worked his way through college tending bar at a Tampa strip club.

Now 76, he lives in St. Petersburg when he's not traveling the globe. He's a world-ranked, competitive masters swimmer who in 1974 became the first judge to swim across San Francisco Bay from Alcatraz. At age 50, he came within 2 miles of conquering the 21-mile English Channel.

Beach has faced some of Florida's most heinous criminals.

Gregory Scott Layman, spurned by his girlfriend Sharon DePaula, waited outside her home on the night of July 24, 1991, and shot her twice with a sawed-off shotgun. After his conviction, Layman asked to be executed and Beach obliged, ordering him to the electric chair. But the Florida Supreme Court overturned him, saying Beach had failed to weigh all the factors before deciding on death. Layman is now serving a life sentence.

In 1999, Beach ordered a second death sentence for Alvin Morton, convicted with three friends of carefully planning a break-in and execution of a 55-year-old Hudson man and his elderly mother in 1992. The state Supreme Court overturned Morton's original death sentence, though Beach did not preside in that trial.

By saving the pinkie finger of John Bowers as a souvenir of his crime, Morton demonstrated cold calculation, Beach noted at the sentencing.

He twice imposed the death sentence in an infamous 1980 murder in Pinellas County. Robert Brian Waterhouse was convicted of beating a woman, stabbing her more than 30 times and sexually mutilating her body before dumping her into Tampa Bay.

Beach gave him the electric chair.

Waterhouse appealed and won a second penalty phase, but the judge doled out the same justice, calling the killing "the worst I've encountered."

He also presided in a very public wrongful death suit against the Church of Scientology that lumbered through years of contentious mediation. The family of Lisa McPherson sued the church after she died in 1995 in its care.

The fight was so bitter that both sides paid Beach to monitor every step, even the taking of depositions. He ultimately forced the final round of mediation that ended with the suit's settlement in 2004.

[Last modified April 15, 2007, 22:33:25]