Spring 3 Security: AccessDeniedHandler is not being invoked

I have a spring 3 application with the configurations given below. When any user tries to access a page and he/she isn't logged in, I get an Access is Denied exception with an ugly stack trace. How do I handle this exception and not let it dump out a stack trace. I implemented my own access-denied-handler but that doesn't get invoked.

Based on the type of the requested resource, I would like to show custom error messages or pages. Here is my spring configuration.

How do I get Spring to invoke my access-denied-handler . Here is my spring configuration

 <security:http auto-config='true'>
    <security:intercept-url pattern="/static/**" filters="none"/>
    <security:intercept-url pattern="/login" filters="none"/>

      <security:intercept-url pattern="/**" access="ROLE_USER" />

      <security:form-login login-page="/index"
            default-target-url="/home" always-use-default-target="true"
            authentication-success-handler-ref="AuthenticationSuccessHandler"        
            login-processing-url="/j_spring_security_check" 
            authentication-failure-url="/index?error=true"/>

       <security:remember-me key="myLongSecretCookieKey" token-validity-seconds="1296000" 
            data-source-ref="jdbcDataSource" user-service-ref="AppUserDetailsService" />

       <security:access-denied-handler ref="myAccessDeniedHandler" />   

    </security:http>

    <bean id="myAccessDeniedHandler"
         class="web.exceptions.handlers.AccessDeniedExceptionHandler">
      <property name="errorPage" value="/public/403.htm" />
    </bean>

The custom class for handling this exception is given below

public class AccessDeniedExceptionHandler implements AccessDeniedHandler
{

    private String errorPage;

    @Override
    public void handle(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response,