Death Sentence (37 page)

Suddenly, Ronnie felt a surge of emotion that he couldn’t suppress. He burst into tears. “Joanna and I have separated,” he said. “I didn’t want you to know. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

She went to him and held him as she had when he was a boy. For more than an hour she listened and consoled while he poured out his pain and fear—he was scared that Joanna was going to try to keep him from seeing Michael, and that he wouldn’t be able to bring him to see her.

“It’s times like this,” she told him, “when we have to rely on faith to get us through.”

Ronnie left feeling better than he had in a long time.

When Velma talked with Jimmie Little the following week, she couldn’t wait to tell him what had happened.

“Ronnie let me be his mother again last Saturday,” she said.

A month earlier, Little and Burr had filed their appeal with the Fourth Circuit Court in Richmond, listing eight issues. They went to Richmond to argue their case on March 8.

Burr was no longer with the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee. He now had two small children, and the work demanded too much time and travel. Late in 1982, he had taken a job in the public defender’s office in Palm Beach, Florida, where a staunch conservative Republican named Richard Jorandby had assembled what many people considered to be the best team of anti-death-penalty lawyers in the nation. But before taking the job, Burr had insisted that he be allowed to remain on Velma’s case, serving without pay and at his own expense.

Little, too, had changed jobs, but unlike Burr he was now closer to Velma, not farther away. At the beginning of the year, he had become chief counsel of the Public Staff of the State Utilities Commission and had moved to an apartment in Raleigh. He was now an employee of the state that was doing its best to kill Velma, but, like Burr, he had told his new bosses that he was committed to her case and would continue to work on it in his free time, also without pay, as he had done all along.

Summer came and passed without a decision from the Fourth Circuit Court.

On Tuesday, October 4, guards came to bring Velma to the administration building without telling her why. Richard Burr had called, she discovered when she got there. She knew then that the appeals court had finally reached its decision. The procedure had become routine, and the outcome had become so common that she dared not allow herself to be optimistic.

As usual, she had no right to be. The court had rejected all of the issues her attorneys had raised.

Velma was in a low mood when she called Pam and Ronnie to tell them the unhappy news. She explained that Burr would be asking the circuit court to reconsider. After that, he would take the case back to the U.S. Supreme Court, the final step in the appellate process. The timetable for all of this was uncertain—perhaps five or six months at most.

Later, she wrote to give Hugh Hoyle the news. “During these difficult days, I’m just asking God for His mercy. God is using every pain and heartache and tear to bring me so very close to His precious side. He is using this to take me inwardly apart, fiber by fiber, giving me ‘a broken and contrite heart,’ and teaching me to walk softly before the Lord and more tenderly with others.”

As 1984 began, a year in which executions would become common across the country, a remarkable thing happened. For three years the state’s legal establishment and news media had been predicting that Velma would be the first to die under North Carolina’s new death penalty, but suddenly somebody moved ahead of her.

James Hutchins, a fifty-four-year-old alcoholic with little education, had been largely unemployed for five years after getting hurt on his job as a tree trimmer. On May 31, 1979, he had gotten into an argument with his eighteen-year-old daughter on her graduation day. He hit her and she fought back. When he began choking her, his wife rushed to her daughter’s aid, and she broke free and fled to a neighbor’s house, where she called the sheriff’s department.

Deputy Roy Huskey, who lived nearby and was the brother of the county sheriff, arrived and attempted to talk to Hutchins, but Hutchins opened fire with a high-powered rifle, hitting Huskey twice, leaving him dead in the yard. Moments later, Sgt. Owen Messersmith arrived to assist Huskey. He was fatally shot through the chest as he got out of his patrol car.

Hutchins fled in his Ford Galaxie, and a state highway patrolman, Robert Peterson, who was thirty-seven, spotted him and took up the chase. Peterson radioed that Hutchins had stopped and was fleeing toward the woods. Then his radio fell silent.

The next law enforcement officer to reach the scene where Hutchins had abandoned his car was another state trooper, Dan Good, a close friend of Peterson. He found his friend still seated in his patrol car, part of his head blown away, a chunk of his skull lying in the road.

Trapped in the nearby woods, Hutchins held more than 200 law enforcement officers at bay through the night. He surrendered to Dan Good when a pack of attack dogs flushed him the next morning.

When Hutchins was sentenced to death in September the presiding judge called him the most dangerous man he’d ever seen.

Many people thought that the reason Hutchins was pushed ahead of Velma was because state officials did not want to return to executions by beginning with a woman. North Carolina had executed only two women in this century, both in the forties, neither of them white.

Whatever the case, the state appeared to be in a special hurry to be rid of Hutchins and, in January 1984, his lawyers twice snatched him back from imminent death, once by six hours, again the same day by only an hour.

After all of Hutchins’ appeals were finally exhausted two months later, Governor Jim Hunt denied clemency, saying it was an extraordinary power to be used only under exceptional circumstances, such as the discovery of new evidence casting doubt on guilt.

Velma had been closely following Hutchins’ case, praying daily for him, his family and lawyers. On the night of March 15, Jimmie Little called the prison to tell her that this time nothing was likely to stop the execution. Sam Roane had already realized that, and he was there with Velma, as was Phil Carter.

“I asked God to be with those who made the decisions on James Hutchins and to forgive them,” Velma told Little.

In 1983, the North Carolina legislature had approved execution by lethal injection, which was assumed to be a more humane means of killing, and Hutchins had chosen it.

At 1:50 on the morning of March 16, Hutchins was rolled into the death chamber covered with a pale green sheet. At 2:17, he was declared dead. Fifteen witnesses, many of them law enforcement officers from Rutherford County, watched him die. One of the witnesses, a friend of the victims, said beforehand that Hutchins’ death would be too easy. “I think he should suffer,” said the sheriff’s deputy. “Let him do a little struggling.”

Hutchins became the fifteenth person to be executed in the nation since the Supreme Court had reinstated capital punishment in 1976, the third to die from lethal injection.

North Carolina was back in the killing business, after an absence of nearly twenty-three years, and Hutchins’ execution proved to be relatively painless for the state, drawing little protest and garnering almost no attention in the national news. But that would not be the case with the next person the state intended to kill. Velma Barfield would soon be the center of an unprecedented, worldwide protest against her execution and the death penalty.

Part Five

On Sinking Sand

20

Twenty-two people would be executed across the nation in 1984, far more than in all of the seven and a half previous years since the death penalty had been revived. Many killers’ appeals were running out, and the mood of the Supreme Court had hardened in favor of death. Velma’s attorneys, like other lawyers fighting to save death-row clients, had little real reason to believe that the court might consider the issues they’d raised.

Jimmie Little had thought all along that Velma’s case eventually would come down to clemency. To have any hope, Little knew that he had to bring pressure on the governor. He had to turn to television, newspapers, magazines to stir public opinion on Velma’s behalf. He had to make her a sympathetic figure, had to let people know the kind of person she was before drugs took over her life, had to let them see what she was like now, redeemed and remorseful, serving a useful purpose in prison.

If enough people came to think that Velma was worth saving and made their feelings known, perhaps the governor would spare her. Unfortunately for Velma, the timing was bad.

Just five weeks before the state killed James Hutchins, Governor Jim Hunt had officially filed for the U.S. Senate seat held by Jesse Helms.

Hunt, a pious, clean-living Presbyterian, was completing his second term as governor, the state’s only two-term governor in this century. He was a rising star of the Democratic Party, frequently mentioned as a future presidential candidate. An admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, he was considered liberal by North Carolina standards. Actually he was a moderate.

Helms, a staunch Baptist who made his fundamentalist, Old Testament religion a strong part of his politics, was finishing his second term in the Senate. He had become a powerful figure in Washington, credited with reviving Ronald Reagan’s national political career, thus a favorite at the White House. A strong supporter of right-wing causes—and of fascist dictators around the world—Helms had built a national following of ultraconservatives who funneled vast amounts of campaign money his way.

The campaign upon which Hunt and Helms were embarking as spring arrived in 1984 would become the most expensive, and most widely watched, Senate race in the country’s history—also one of the nastiest.

Jimmie Little realized that he would have to seek clemency for Velma during the heat of the Helms-Hunt campaign, and that could only diminish her prospects. Already Helms was trying to paint Hunt as “wishy-washy,” a “weak-willed liberal,” and any action that made Hunt appear to be soft on criminals, particularly multiple murderers, would be put to good use by the Helms camp. A poll made at the time of the Hutchins execution showed that two-thirds of North Carolinians approved the death penalty, and other polls put the figure at seventy percent and higher.

Hunt had not always been in that number. “As a college student I was opposed to capital punishment,” he said, explaining his position. “But in later years, after I read a lot of theology, I came to realize that human beings have an awesome responsibility to maximize love and to minimize hurt, and especially death. I believe that capital punishment is a deterrent in most cases. If the law is enforced fairly and people are made aware of that, I believe it will result in fewer murders and thus more lives will be saved.”

Clearly, Hunt had lived up to his convictions in Hutchins’ case, and that promised little reason for hope in Velma’s.

Still, it was possible that the governor’s decision on Hutchins had freed him to show mercy to Velma. Hunt could point to Hutchins to demonstrate that he was willing to take strong stands against crime. If he could be convinced that Velma’s condition at the time of her crimes had not truly been made known at her trial and that she was now a different person, perhaps he would want to prove that he also could be humane and forgiving when it was warranted.

In January, Little had begun organizing a support committee to rally people to Velma’s cause and to raise money for the clemency effort. Its members included opponents of capital punishment, ministers, and friends of Velma. Among them were Wade Holder, the teacher and coach who once had lived with Velma’s parents, and John Lotz, the assistant athletic director at the University of North Carolina, who taught Bible studies in prisons and was the brother-in-law of Billy and Ruth Graham’s daughter, Anne Lotz.

Another member of the committee was Phyllis Tyler, a writer, who was on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union in Wake County. She had been visiting Velma in prison for four years. She kicked off the campaign for clemency in February with a column on the Sunday editorial pages of the
News & Observer.

She had been anxious about visiting Velma in the beginning, she wrote. “I didn’t think I would like her or that I could relate to her. Velma Barfield was the surprise of my life. She is warm and kind; she is funny, real and very human … I consider her one of my best friends.”

She went on to tell about Velma’s effect on other inmates, then related an incident that had happened when she had gone to see Velma after one of her appeals had been rejected and she was low.

“Come on home with me, Velma,” she’d told her as she was leaving. “Climb into my pocket, and we’ll beat it out of here.”

“She laughed,” Tyler wrote, “then she became serious. ‘If I thought I could go out into the free world,’ she said, ‘back to the life I used to lead, I’d say, Shut them gates! I’ve never been so useful as I am right here in prison. People need me here. This is where I belong— and I wouldn’t choose to be anywhere else in the world.’

“That’s why I believe the world needs Velma. There aren’t too many people like her and almost nobody like her in prison.

“She’s on the side of the angels and she is strategically placed. To execute her to fulfill a point of law is not just a personal tragedy, it is a terrible waste.”

In March, after Hutchins’ execution, Little stepped down as chief counsel of the Public Staff of the State Utilities Commission to give more time to saving Velma. He remained a staff attorney.