A FRAIL, grey-haired great-grandmother will be taken from her cell on Texas's death row next Thursday to a chamber where onlookers will see her strapped to a stretcher and injected with $86 (£53) worth of lethal chemicals.

Three days after her 63rd birthday, Betty Lou Beets looks likely to become the oldest inmate - and only the second woman - to be executed in Texas since the re-institution of the death penalty in 1976.

She will also be the 120th person to be executed on the watch of George W. Bush, the Texas Governor, who has set a record pace in disposing of those incarcerated on death row. In the midst of the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Mr Bush finds himself assailed by the anti-death penalty lobby, which says that he is in danger of presiding over a miscarriage of justice. Beets claims she was a battered wife.

At her trial in 1985 Beets was portrayed as a Black Widow, a cold-blooded killer who had shot dead two husbands to claim their life insurance. It had appeared originally that her fifth husband, Jimmy Beets, had drowned while out in his boat on a lake.

Two years later, however, acting on a tip-off, investigators found the fireman's decomposing body in a sleeping bag buried in the grounds of Beets's mobile home in Gun Barrel City.

They also found the body of Beets's fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Barker, under the patio. Both had gunshot wounds to the head and the jury returned guilty verdicts.

But there is a more complicated version of the story. The jury rejected Beets's claim that her son, Robert Branson, had killed her husband during an argument and that she had helped to bury the body because he was on probation.

It also rejected the defence's insistence that there was no evidence that she fired the gun and it was not to know that Beets subsequently would not be tried with the murder of her fourth husband, whose death was used to show a pattern of spousal homicide.

However, those fighting to save Beets's life say that the crucial factor is that the court was not told about her background. In a letter to Mr Bush appealing for a stay of execution, Amnesty and the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence say that Beets has hearing problems and is mentally handicapped, that she was raised by a violent and alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother and went through a succession of abusive marriages.

She was married first at 15, became a mother a year later and was a grandmother at 30. All along the way, but particularly in the last two marriages, she was battered. Even if she killed her husband, the argument runs, she should be spared death because she had suffered provocation. In an interview this week, Beets said that she could not remember the killing, which she said took place after a quarrel while she was getting ready for her bath.

"We started arguing, and after that I really don't remember much of what happened except that my son came in and [Jimmy] started in on him. And he had already gotten a gun."

Juley Fulcher, of the National Coalition, said: "Texas failed to protect Betty Lou Beets when she was being beaten by an abusive spouse. It will be a terrible miscarriage of justice if she is executed."

Those clamouring for clemency have been joined by Sister Helen Prejean, whose non-fiction book about a man on death row, Dead Man Walking, was turned into a film. They point out that in five other states the sentences of battered women have been commuted. During the six years that Mr Bush has been Governor, his state has far exceeded any other in executing its prisoners. Just one sentence has been commuted, that of a man who was conclusively shown to have been in a different state at the time of the crime of which he had been convicted.

There has been increased debate about the death penalty after a decision by the right-wing Governor of Illinois to halt all executions in his state, because 13 people scheduled to die had turned out to be innocent.

They included three accused who were exonerated after a student project showed that other men were guilty. At least one innocent man is believed to have died there.

This week President Clinton said that Governors should "look very closely" at their death penalty systems to make sure that innocent people were not executed.