If a bean property gets accessed as part of an EL expression evaluation, and the bean accessor throws an exception, that exception currently does not get exposed by the JspException that is thrown by org.apache.taglibs.standard.lang.jstl.Evaluator.evaluate() after catching the ELException. However, that exception may contain information that could be very useful in tracking down the root cause of the failure (e.g., the accessor may involve connecting to a database, in which case it would be useful to expose the SQL exception in case things go wrong).
Fixed and integrated in Standard Taglib 1.0.2.